Things We Saw Above
by Queen Riza
Summary: When Adam decided to take a job with the FBI, he didn't expect to be thrown into a past he'd spent ten years trying to forget. He also expected fewer aliens. This is an X-Files AU, but I know very little about the X-Files and to read this you don't need to know anything about it at all.


A/N: Well, this is it: the X-Files fic with Adam and Gansey I've been talking about for months. It was originally intended to be a short 3-5k one shot, but, well, it became this instead. I had a lot of fun writing this and I really hope you guys enjoy it! A huge thanks to Grace (thewarlocksbitch on tumblr) for betaing for me!

* * *

Virginian summers were sickly, sweaty affairs. The sun beat down with a strength that had the misfortune of being accentuated each year by decades of atmospheric decay and the nearby Atlantic clung desperately to the heat in palpable lukewarm drops that gave the sensation of drowning with every breath. Summer had not been one of the things Adam Parrish had missed when he left Virginia at eighteen.

There were few things he did.

Beside him, his partner Federal Agent Richard Gansey III was humming the tune to some great hit of the 80s that had been playing at the run-down diner where they had gotten their lunch. He was tapping his thumb against the steering wheel to a half-forgotten beat as his eyes scanned the highway in front of them. The humidity did not seem to faze him, but few things fazed Gansey. His brown hair still hung in its perfectly tousled waves and the single bead of sweat that adorned his forehead seemed to oddly suit him, like he was a model in an ad for athletic wear.

Adam looked out the window to the miles of all-too-familiar forest that passed by at a decidedly illegal 80 miles per hour. They could have flown—they should have flown; it would have been an absurdly short flight and entirely paid for by the FBI. But Gansey, eternally distrustful of the people who paid his salary and far too in love with the sensation of being on the road, had insisted that the two-hour drive from Washington DC to Henrietta, Virginia was too short to put on the government dime.

They passed by a small house hidden among the tangled foliage, run down and painted a lurid green. It was only the faintest of memories, but Adam could have sworn he had seen it before. He felt sick.

"So this case," he said, hoping to distract himself. "Go over it for me again."

Gansey's face lit up with a peculiar sort of enthusiasm, the way it always did when discussing one of the X-Files. It was odd in a way, given the darker nature of their work—happy circumstances rarely lead them to investigation—but it was the intellectual curiosity of possibility that enthused Gansey, the unknowable circumstances behind each case and hope that one day they might be known.

Still, he had the courtesy to adopt a sober expression before saying, "Missing person's case. Turner Gladwell, a student from the nearby prep school, um… I forget the name—"

 _Aglionby,_ Adam provided in his head.

"Well, they were off in the woods around Henrietta. Messing around, probably drunk; you know, like kids do. Suddenly it starts raining, lightning flashes, and there's all sort of… unusual fauna."

"Meaning?"

Gansey frowned. "To tell you the truth, I'm not quite sure. Some sort of deer is what I got from the report, and in copious amounts. The kids realized they were in some a stampede and drove out as fast as they could. It wasn't until they got out that they noticed one of them was gone. When they reported it to the police, they assumed they must be high, typical with these boys I guess, but Turner was still gone and they were soaked to the bone from this rainstorm. The thing was, no one else in town had experienced the storm. Just a quiet night in Virginia.

"What's more," he added, and this was where he started to get really excited; he could hardly keep the grin off his face and the faraway look in his eyes betrayed a mind somewhere else entirely. "Is that Henrietta is basically a hotbed of supernatural happenings."

Adam couldn't keep the shock off his face. "It _is_?" he said, with far more surprise than he had been willing to betray. Henrietta for him meant dirt roads and sleepless nights. It was a place of mundanity, where dreams died unless you had the gall to escape, to power through for eighteen years and then run as fast as you could, before the dust choked you and you found yourself trapped in a cycle of waiting for a future you had forgotten to make for yourself.

But Gansey was a nut job, Adam reminded himself; he had figured that out ten minutes into his first day with the FBI. He still couldn't figure out whether sticking the rookie with Dick Gansey, with his UFO sightings and insistence on explaining everything with the unbelievable, had been some kind of bizarre hazing or was simply because _someone_ had to do it.

He had a lot of respect for Gansey and he wouldn't deny it. He had an easy sort of charisma—undoubtedly essential in securing continuing government funding for his ridiculous sub-department, a keen perception for the details someone else might have ignored, and an indisputably brilliant—if eccentric—mind. But that didn't make Adam any less resentful of having his career stunted by being essentially locked up in the FBI's conspiracy theory basement.

"You wouldn't believe me if I told you," Gansey said honestly and Adam nodded in acquiescence. He told him anyway.

"Well to top it off, it's directly along a ley line—" He looked at Adam carefully. "Um… a supernatural energy source. They travel linearly around the world." He was searching for the words to make him understand. Gansey wasn't used to having a partner, and certainly wasn't used to discussing this with people who weren't just as into this sort of thing as him, shady internet correspondents and UFO hunters met at dingy conventions. Adam's first week on the job, he hadn't even been able to pretend to keep up with what Gansey was saying to him.

"Got it," he said, which was mostly true.

"Right. Also, just weird happenings over time. Nineteen years ago, there was this fireworks show that people thought had to be a mass hallucination—" Adam's mouth quirked with something that wasn't quite nostalgia, but a forgotten memory that only became amusing in resurgence. He remembered Joseph Kavinsky. "Sightings of animals that just didn't seem quite right, cars that never should have gone that fast, little girls with the legs of a goat, these massive… _things_ , birds maybe, that someone saw tear a deer to shreds. It's just little things, strange stories that, individually, could have been hoaxes, but added up in conjunction to this it makes for something we can't ignore any longer."

"What's your theory then?" Adam asked despite himself. "Aliens?"

"What's yours?" Gansey countered, knowing that Adam was teasing him but refusing to care. Adam thought he admired that in Gansey above all else, how his truth was the only thing that mattered, how the ridicule of an unbelieving world was to him due to a fault of their close-mindedness and not one of his own. Adam couldn't imagine a world where the way people looked at you didn't feel like everything, even when you knew it wasn't. He suspected it was because Gansey had grown up rich. His survival had never depended on other people's approval.

"A bunch of rich kids trip out in the middle of the woods. One of them ODs without them noticing or remembering and they lose him in the forest. Somewhere along the line they fall into a creek or something and get soaked." There was no doubt in his mind that this was how it had played out. He had known too many Aglionby boys in his time—been one himself, though always separated by that veil of circumstance. They thought they were invincible, had forgotten somewhere in between the ski trips and fancy cars that the one thing that couldn't be bought and paid for was a human soul.

"And everything else?" Gansey questioned.

"Overexcited locals," Adam said dismissively. "Even you can't believe every Big Foot sighting is real. People get spooked, they look at something weird for a moment, soon enough a grainy photo is on their blog and they think the Loch Ness Monster has immigrated."

"So quick to assume the worst in people," Gansey said with a faint smile. "Don't you have any faith in the inexplicable elements of life?"

Adam had never had any faith, in God or humanity or otherwise. What he had were the facts, the knowledge that there was always a logical answer, a practical solution, and whether it was one he liked or not had never much seemed to matter. There were no mystical forces at play, no higher spiritual phenomena, simply equations he didn't yet know. Perhaps that was the reason he still hadn't requested a change in partners; Gansey's eccentricity confounded him, but Adam found himself fascinated by the contradictions he couldn't yet explain, always closer, one step closer, to the missing piece of the puzzle.

"It's practicality," he said. "Your theory?"

"I don't think this one's aliens. Well," He lifted his right hand from the steering wheel to subconsciously rub his thumb along his bottom lip, as he often did when he was deep in thought. "I wouldn't _discount_ some kind of extraterrestrial activity. But I'm keeping an open mind on this one."

"Fair enough," Adam said and they spent the rest of the drive in comfortable silence, Gansey's Camaro zipping along fast enough that when Gansey rolled down the window, the faux breeze almost provided some kind of relief against the relentless heat.

* * *

Gansey wasn't entirely sure what to make of it. The schoolboys had been tragically unhelpful; he couldn't help but wonder if there was some merit to Adam's theory they had been high during their encounter with the supernatural. The details of their story, the sudden rainfall, the stampeding creatures, their missing friend, were recalled with a shocking absence of detail. Still, their stories all aligned nearly perfectly, even when interviewed separately, even when grilled for the facts that Gansey doubted the boys, if lying, would have the foresight to prepare for ahead of time, made him think that there had to be some truth to the tale.

And then there was the comment one of the boys had made right before he and Adam had left.

"Oh yeah, and right before the stampede, somebody said something. Like somebody far away. And in Latin or something."

"What?" Adam had said incredulously. "What did they say?"

"I don't know," the boy said with a frown. "It was in Latin."

"You're taking Latin, _asshole_ ," one of his friends shot at him, but the boys agreed that yeah, despite the jumbled moments of fogged memory and panic that would follow, that actually sounded pretty familiar.

This was why Gansey wasn't ready to discount abduction—the use of Latin was dubious, but this confirmed his suspicions of the presence of something _other_ — though he knew it was what would make Adam suspect homicide. He didn't care; he knew he wouldn't soon get his partner to convert to his way of seeing the world and he was grateful for the reason to not have to argue with him over whether they should stay. He had been worried Adam would try to dismiss the case as an accident, a waste of their time, and insist on driving back up to DC the next day. He seemed on edge in Henrietta for reasons Gansey couldn't quite discern. Well, actually Adam always seemed on edge; in Henrietta, he had the countenance of someone walking through a haunted house that had been quiet for too long—he lived in anticipation of terror.

He had also refused to conduct the interview with the boys at Aglionby, as the school had offered, making Gansey meet them instead at a seedy pizza joint. That had seemed utterly unlike Adam, almost unprofessional, and Gansey wasn't sure whether to count his partner's strange behavior as evidence of the supernatural effects of the town, or if this was symptomatic of something deeper than that. For all his charm, Gansey had never been good with people, at least not in a way he felt counted. He found himself either interested only in the surface of people, small talk and bantering conversation, or else fell quickly into a fascination and connection he rarely felt was returned. He still wasn't sure what to make of Adam; he knew he admired his sharp mind, his ability to compartmentalize, that hunger that was always just behind his eyes, but for these past few months of their partnership, Adam had always held himself at an arm's length from Gansey and from everyone else. There was no knowing him.

"We need to investigate the forest," Adam said, and for once he and Gansey were in agreement. "Even if they don't know exactly where they were, there has to be some evidence—I mean, they were driving their damn car through the woods—and maybe we can find out what happened to the kid, some sign of a struggle."

This was something the police should have found during their preliminary investigation before involving the feds, but both Gansey and Adam had distrusted the local authorities immediately. The men they had encountered at the local police station had become far too complacent in a sleepy town like Henrietta, adorned with expensive clothes and fancy watches doubtlessly from decades of taking bribes for looking the other way while the sons of wealthier men committed misdemeanor after misdemeanor.

But Gansey wasn't sure if these were the first steps he wanted to take. A more thorough investigation perhaps, a preliminary look into what the local energy lore was. This connection with ley lines seemed perhaps too big to discount. He didn't know how that connected with extraterrestrial activity, but Gansey also hadn't ended up in this line of work by not having an open mind. This could be anything, and he was the first to admit it.

He looked up from the newspaper he was holding to Adam across the table of the restaurant they had grabbed lunch in. He wasn't entirely sure how to broach the subject.

"What did you have in mind?" he said.

Adam looked at his food—a half-eaten grilled cheese sandwich—thoughtfully. "We can just go in the two of us for now," he said. "But carefully. If we find anything that gives us any reason to think a killer might be hiding out there, we'll call DC for backup."

Gansey looked back at the paper. He was checking the Classifieds for anything that looked like it might be useful in his research into Henrietta's supernatural. Currently, he had the number of a local psychic encircled in a bright red ink. He had had enough experience with phony psychics in his time to be skeptical, but also enough experience with good ones to think the number might warrant calling. At the very least, it was a start. Real or not, those who made their living off of people's belief in the otherworldly made it their business to know what the inexplicable was and where it occurred.

It took him a moment before he realized that Adam was waiting for him to respond. He had been perfectly willing to go along with whatever his partner suggested; surely Adam was aware that he trusted him—disagreed with him on several fundamental principles, of course—but he had complete faith in his abilities as an agent.

It was easy to forget that Adam was still technically new to this job, playing by the book because he didn't have the years of experience to act as a guide. That was supposed to be Gansey, he supposed, the experience that made up for Adam's lack thereof. Adam was waiting for his approval.

Interesting.

"That's fine by me," he said, and Adam nodded curtly. The moment had passed. "I just have a few house calls I need to make afterward."

" _Here?"_ Adam said, more incredulous than Gansey was willing to believe the situation warranted. _What was it about this place?_ "To who?"

"Oh, you know," he said casually. "The usual. Crazed mad men hunting for the Jersey Devil in Henrietta's back woods."

Adam didn't laugh, as Gansey had hoped, just simply raised an eyebrow. It was an amused eyebrow at least.

"I'm joking of course," he added. "Anyone worth consulting in the least would be miles from here if he was looking for the Jersey Devil. In Jersey, hopefully." And he laughed at that last part because he felt it deserved it and he certainly didn't have the right audience. "No," he said, and he pushed the paper across to Adam.

Maybe it was just the light, but for a moment, he seemed to pale.

 _"Psychics?"_

"It will be a quick stop," Gansey promised. And then, hesitantly, "Are you uncomfortable? I thought you didn't believe in spirituality."

"I don't," he said quickly.

"Then you won't mind me stopping by? Aside from moral convictions about me throwing my money away."

"That's your business," Adam said unconvincingly.

Gansey picked the paper back up and folded it under his arm, gesturing to the waitress that they were ready for the check. "Excellent. Top notch." He glanced at Adam again, who seemed to be lost in his own mind, unaware of Gansey's curious gaze. There was more than one mystery in Henrietta, Gansey was beginning to realize. He had no doubt he would find an entire host of them before this trip was over.

* * *

The forest was getting denser and denser and it was getting harder to justify driving Gansey's bright orange Camaro among the foliage. But there was something comforting about the security of the car as their surroundings reminded Adam more and more of stories about the raw power of nature and lost travelers having to reconcile a life spent coddled by the modern world with bleaker forces of the outdoors who abandoned morality for the simpler law of survival.

Also, Adam wasn't sure how to ask Gansey to leave his car behind so they could explore deeper into the forest. It was old for sure, but that didn't change the fact that it was a model that the more practical Adam, the Adam in him that could not escape the trailer park, that still scrimped and saved out of deep-seated habit and fear despite his comfortable salary, would never be able to justify owning in his life. And Gansey loved that thing like he loved life; if anything happened to it, Adam didn't want to feel responsible.

"Well," Gansey said as the Camaro drifted to a halt in front a part of the road that had become particularly overtaken by foliage. "I suppose this is the best sort of parking spot we can expect around here." He didn't look happy about it, rubbing his thumb along the edge of the steering wheel in a concerned, almost affectionate way before he shook his head abruptly and climbed out.

"Ready?"

Adam swung the car door shut, taking a moment to look through the denseness of the forest. They should have come earlier in the day. It wasn't particularly dark as it was, but whatever spot those boys had stumbled on had thick enough foliage to block out a good deal of the already waning light. This was a part of Henrietta he had never ventured to in his time as a resident. Then again, Henrietta had never been more than a liminal space in Adam's life, the place he had had the misfortune of beginning his existence and had spent 18 years looking past—biking to Aglionby, biking to work, biking back home when he couldn't find an excuse to be anywhere else. It was an area that had existed in transit; you didn't search for the hidden beauties of the gas station outhouse you shit in halfway through a road trip.

"They couldn't have gotten far," he observed, walking briskly into the woods. "If they made it back to their cars so quickly."

Gansey hadn't stepped past the edge of the road yet. Something still seemed to be on his mind and this put Adam on edge more than anything else.

"Do you have your watch on you?" he said with a casual air Adam didn't quite believe. "I seem to have forgotten mine."

Adam looked down at his wrist. "5:34," he told him.

"5:34," Gansey repeated to himself without explanation. "Alright. Better go ahead then, huh?"

Adam felt that, perhaps in the darkness of the overhanging foliage, he had misjudged this place. It didn't take long, a few minutes of walking in an almost companionable silence, before the remaining light had begun to creep in through the leafy gaps overhead, painting geometric shapes with light along Adam and Gansey's figures like dual colored stained glass. Soon, the light no longer crept but jumped forward in bursts, illuminating an area he hadn't expected to find: a cheerfully babbling brook weaving between a few trees grasping up at the sky with slender limbs alongside their clear predecessor, a massive thing with a rotted out hollow large enough Adam imagined he could walk inside.

He could see why the boys had chosen to get high here; uninebriated, it was already picturesque in a way he still couldn't quite believe. In the distance, he thought he could almost hear music, but he was sure that was only a trick of the combination of the faintly murmuring breeze and the memory of whatever Gansey's radio had been playing on the way over. This place felt like a memory, the impression of someone he had known before but whose name he had forgotten. He had seen other parts of the forest around Henrietta, of course, and this had to be simply a distant impression, a memory of a similar spot he had forgotten years before. Still, it mesmerized him in ways he couldn't explain, something that went beyond a mere aesthetic or even nostalgic appreciation for the spot. He found himself examining the surrounding foliage in almost a trance. He put his hand against the huge ancient tree, almost on the childish verge of stepping inside—

"Adam?" Gansey's voice was strangely quiet but tinged with the curious excitement he was familiar with hearing when they discussed a particularly inexplicable case. "Come over here?"

Adam did so obediently and crouched down beside Gansey at the pool of water.

"You see those fish?" Gansey asked and it took Adam a moment not to say, annoyed, that of course he did. They were red flickers against the deep brown of the bottom of the shallow pool, an impossible contrast to miss.

He nodded instead. He had gotten used to Gansey's unintentionally patronizing way of speech by now. He knew he didn't mean anything by it; years of over-education, a childhood spent coddled by the luxuries of the one percent, and the ability to leisurely pursue academia out of pleasure and not the harsh, ever-present fear of failure had made most subjects seem like common knowledge to Gansey. The line defining the boundaries of what most people knew and what would be ridiculous to expect them to be aware of was one he had never quite seemed able to grasp, always over explaining the simple things and breezing past the complex. However, understanding the habit didn't mean it grinded any less on Adam's nerves.

"What color are they?" Now Adam couldn't tell if Gansey was serious. He shot him an annoyed look.

"Red."

Gansey grinned triumphantly in a way Adam didn't exactly think the situation merited.

"What color are they now?"

Adam was seriously debating whether pushing Gansey into the pool would be an overreaction but when he looked back down to the fish, he found that they were not, in fact, red. Somehow, in the moment he had taken to glare at his partner, new fish had taken their place or some factor in the light had changed or—he didn't know.

"They're black." And they were, barely distinguishable from the muddy bottom. "What happened? Did you see?"

Gansey shook his head. "They were this color when we came here," he said carefully. "And I just thought for a moment that it didn't make sense, that the type of fish swimming in this part of Virginia are usually red, and suddenly, well..."

Adam looked at him incredulously. "They _became_ red?"

"I thought it seemed ridiculous too; that's why I checked with you!" Gansey said defensively. "But we both saw what happened. You can't argue with that, that's science!"

It was a loose definition, Adam thought, but there was no point in arguing with Gansey, who understood exactly as much as he did. He shook his head, standing up. If he was still in university maybe, or in a research position, he would have tried to look into this further. He was still tempted, as it was, a gnawing question in the back of his mind. But he was not here for fish, and that knowledge grounded him somewhat. He was becoming more and more aware of a sensation in his stomach he had been experiencing ever since he had seen the fish change, a sensation he knew too well to be fear. The unknown haunted him, questions begged to be answered, phenomena waited to be explained. But for the first time, Adam questioned how much he really wanted to know.

Something caught his eye, a burst of red against the wood of the big oak tree, in passing not unlike the sharp flash of the fish's former hue, but this featured more morbid connotations.

"Gansey," he gestured the other man over to him, already taking out the materials he needed to collect a sample of the blood.

"Do you think it's Turner's?" Gansey said grimly.

"It could be," Adam replied. "It's a start."

And that's all it was. It was a tiny sample, evidence of a struggle at most damning and the result of a bad scrape at most likely.

"I'm going to see if there's anything else in the tree," he said, stepping into the gruesome blackened cavity that had hollowed out the oak. He could hear Gansey close behind him.

It was dark inside and the air felt agreeably warm around him, permeated by the pleasant smell of oak. For a moment, Adam embraced this temporary refuge and he closed his eyes.

He was no longer in the tree. It was dark and he had to strain to see, feeling around to gain his bearings. He had the peculiar sensation of feeling where he grasped—grass wet with dew drops, rough wood; he was just outside of the oak now, he was beginning to realize—and watching a figure distantly mirror his movements. In a moment of haunting awareness, he understood suddenly that he was watching himself.

Something sickeningly warm slid between his fingers among the blades of grass.

 _You're stronger than this_ , Adam reminded himself as his stomach threatened to lurch. He reached out further but already knew what he would find; he could see himself, reduced to mere silhouette, one arm outstretched, long fingers centimeters from touching the other figure he could make out in the darkness, the obscured outline of a corpse.

Adam didn't understand what was happening, simply that somehow he had been led here, to something he could only hope was answers, or a glimpse of a clue. There would be time for trying to make sense of the situation later if only now he could take a look at the corpse of the boy and understand where they were.

Adam took a moment to fight back disgust to force himself to get a good look at the body. It was not Turner Gladwell.

It was Gansey.

Adam opened his eyes, tripping out of the tree and into the comparative light. Gansey followed behind him a few moments later.

"What did you..." he trailed off, not sure how to end the sentence. What did he call that? A vision? A hallucination? It seemed a little vulnerable, he thought, to admit he had seen something in the tree and risk finding out Gansey had not. What would that make him, crazy? Uniquely attuned to something otherworldly?

Gansey did not look at all disturbed by whatever had happened in the tree, so Adam was willing to bet he hadn't shared Adam's vision, hadn't seen his own dilapidated corpse continuing to bleed out into dewy grass.

"You saw something too?" Gansey asked when Adam didn't finish his thought.

"Yes," he said, and then after a moment, "The wood is rotting. We might have inhaled some kind of fungi that caused—"

"But you don't actually believe that."

Adam didn't answer for a moment, just listened to the sound of his own still racing heart. "I don't," he admitted.

"What did you... what did you see?"

Adam paused at the way Gansey seemed to walk around the question, but brushed it off. He suddenly couldn't make his eyes meet the other man's. What he had seen couldn't have meant anything in the end; there was no way he had actually gotten a glimpse of the future. But still... he looked up at Gansey, who was waiting almost anxiously for his response. He couldn't bring himself to tell him.

"What did _you_ see?" Adam rebutted.

Gansey gave a funny sort of half laugh. "Fair enough. Secrets may not be particularly becoming, but there's always a time and place for the ugliest of practices."

For a moment, he seemed self-conscious in a way Adam wasn't used to seeing his partner, a man who could easily charm a witness into a confession on his worst days, who had an assuredness that made Adam sometimes want to believe in the impossible if it also meant believing in yourself. Adam still didn't know Gansey very well, he realized.

"Are we done here?" Adam asked, trying to move past the awkwardness of the moment, the tang of the knowledge of hidden information on both sides. "I have the blood samples."

Gansey glanced around the forest. "I would say so," he said, satisfied.

The two walked back to the Camaro together in a silence that was not quite uncomfortable, but not altogether comfortable either.

"What is it next then, the psychics?" Adam said resignedly as they got in the car.

Gansey frowned a little as he started the engine up. It took a few sputtering tries until the Camaro has roared into life, but by this point, the noise had become an unavoidable backdrop to Adam's employment. "Would you think it terribly superstitious of me if I had them take a look at that blood sample you collected? Just in case?"

Adam almost remarked that he didn't believe in psychics, so yes, of course, he found it quaint and superstitious of Gansey, but if he _did_ believe that would probably be the first thing he would ask them. Then, he almost reminded him that that was almost certainly against protocol and not how to properly handle evidence, that there needed to be paperwork involved.

"I think that would be alright," he said instead, looking out at the passing trees.

Maybe he was more superstitious than he wanted to let himself believe.

Gansey's mouth quirked for a moment, but his brow suddenly furrowed with concern, peering up at the road ahead of them. "What's that?"

A deep black BMW drove up the road towards them.

The off shooting dirt road they had taken into the forest was the sort that was wide for one car, and a tight squeeze for two. Nevertheless, Gansey drove the Camaro as close to the edge of the road as it permitted to make way for the new presence.

"Should we pull them over?" he said in a low voice. "Ask them what they're doing here? This could be returning to the scene of the crime."

Before Adam had time to ponder the strategy in that, he caught a better view of the BMW's driver.

With a glimpse at the strong angular features, the shaved head, the vicious look in the driver's eyes, Adam felt himself swept up in memories that had long since been dismissed as irrelevant and no longer needed. As apprehensive as he had felt returning to his old hometown, to his old school, he hadn't really thought he would risk running into anyone who would remember him. The boys he had attended Aglionby Academy with were even more visitors than he had been; it was merely one more step towards their final destination as CEOs or politicians, or else at least blacking out in a yacht surrounded by booze and drugs that had been purchased with inherited money. No one settled in Henrietta or the surrounding area after graduation.

So what the hell was Ronan Lynch doing here?

It was possible he wouldn't recognize him; Adam and Ronan had hardly run in the same circles at Aglionby and Ronan had held a cool disdain for those around him that Adam felt had probably extended to complete dismissal in his case. Still, it threw Adam for long enough that he didn't answer Gansey and the BMW passed by, he and his former classmate locking eyes for half a second.

The moment had not been lost on Gansey. "Who was that?" he asked, turning to watch the BMW fade into the distance as his thumb brushed against the edge of his lower lip.

"No one," Adam said, shaking his head. There would be time figure out what this meant later. "Let's go see those psychics, huh?"

* * *

Gansey wasn't sure whether probing Adam for an explanation of his strangeness in the car was an appropriate reaction, and regardless of whether it was, if it would actually yield helpful results or just annoy his partner enough to make this assignment more strained than it already was.

But in combination with Adam's peculiarity throughout the trip, questioning the moment was unavoidable. Curiosity, as always, was a tumor that had grown too close to Gansey's heart; too entangled with his concept of being alive to ever be separated, but carrying the knowledge with every heartbeat that this was the thing that would doom him.

"I can't help but think," he began carefully, "that you're being rather unfair to me."

Adam blinked in surprise. He had clearly not thought that whatever was bothering him was apparent enough for Gansey to pick up on.

"Um… okay," he said. "About what?"

Gansey cleared his throat a little. "You've been hiding something from me. I haven't wanted to press you about it—God knows we're all entitled to our personal lives—but if it's beginning to affect this case then I think I ought to know what it is."

The Camaro stopped in front of the little blue house whose address Gansey had copied down into his phone. Adam still seemed to be thinking about how he wanted to answer Gansey. He looked frustrated, but not as much as Gansey had expected. Good. For once his words weren't more careless than he had realized.

Gansey shifted uncomfortably. "We can talk about this later if you'd like, and just deal with this now."

Adam leaned back a bit in the leather seat of the Camaro. "You can go in; I'm staying in the car."

Gansey was surprised despite himself; maybe he had upset him more than he'd realized. "Really? I kind of thought you would get a kick out of seeing this sort of thing. Even for a nonbeliever."

"Even for a nonbeliever," Adam echoed. "Maybe, but not here."

"Adam? _Adam Parrish_?"

The two men swiveled their heads towards the source of the voice, coming from just outside the psychics' house.

"Oh shit," Adam muttered just under his breath.

The young woman who walked—actually, stormed might have been a better word—towards the Camaro was probably close to Adam and Gansey's age. Gansey would have said 28 under pressure for an honest estimate, 25 if there was reason to flatter. She had dark brown skin and dark hair tied up into a knot on the top of her head with bits and pieces dyed a rainbow of colors, as well as some of the most delightfully confusing wardrobe choices Gansey had ever seen. She was, he couldn't help but notice as she got closer and the proportion of her to the Camaro became even more evident, extremely short.

"Is that really you?" she asked, leaning over to peer through the Camaro's window.

Adam looked a bit like he wished he had reclined the Camaro's seat far enough to completely hide himself from view.

"Blue," he finally said, climbing out of the car with a hint of the polite half-smile he was so good at using to both dodge personal questions and ease witnesses into confidence. "I didn't think I would see you here. I thought you were out in California with some environment job."

"I am," she said. "This is visiting. Although I don't expect you're familiar with the concept."

Gansey stepped out of the Camaro and strode around to the front. "I'm afraid I'm a bit out of the loop; how exactly do you two know each other?" he asked, extending his hand to the woman. "Richard Gansey."

"Blue Sargent," she said, thoroughly unimpressed. "Adam and I used to date."

"Oh," Gansey said. For whatever reason, he hadn't expected this.

"I haven't seen you since we were in high school," she said to Adam.

"High school," Gansey repeated. Things were falling into place in a disjointed sort of way; he was getting a glimpse of what picture the puzzle was supposed to be, but still didn't know how all the jagged lines and swooping curves fit together. Adam glanced at him quickly, clearly agitated, and Blue ignored him.

"Well you know, I've been busy."

"For ten years?"

"Just about," he glanced at Gansey once more out the corner of his eye and then sighed resignedly. "You know I never planned on coming back to this place."

Well, there it was, confirmation of Gansey's newly minted suspicions.

"You don't need to. That's why we have phones."

"You know what I mean."

Blue sighed and bit the edge of her lip. "So, are you guys their 6 o'clock, then?"

"6 o'clock?" Adam said, sounding a bit surprised, and Gansey knew he was remembering Gansey's question to him before entering the forest.

 _"Do you have your watch on you? I seem to have forgotten mine."_

 _"5:34."_

They had been in that forest nearly half an hour, not even counting the drive into town. 6 o'clock should have been impossible, and yet here they were.

 _What does your science make of that, Adam Parrish?_

"We should be," he said politely and started walking up to the house.

"So are you two partners?" she asked.

"Yes," Gansey replied just as Adam started to say, "She doesn't mean it like that, Gansey." Turning to Blue he added, "We're agents."

"What, like Mission: Impossible?"

"Like the FBI."

"So more of a less fun, bureaucratic version?"

"Maybe," Adam said dryly. "I haven't seen Mission: Impossible."

Blue frowned a bit, crossing her arms firmly. It was an almost intimidating stance if you discounted her height. "What exactly does the FBI want at 300 Fox Way?"

"Ask him," Adam said, gesturing towards Gansey, who felt himself suddenly being noticed again.

"I was just hoping for a general impression of the area. You know, supernaturally," he added and Blue made skeptical _hmph_ noise. "And to get a possible psychic read on this." He tried to show her the blood sample but she held up her hands in protest.

"I can't help you there," she said. "Not psychic."

"Oh," he said. "Well that's alright, neither am I."

She scowled at him but Adam looked a bit amused, which was what he'd been hoping for.

"Gansey seems to be of the opinion that Henrietta is some sort of magical hotbed," Adam informed her with a wry look.

Blue's frown grew deeper. "You might not be wrong," she said with a nod towards Gansey. "Obviously, _I_ can't feel anything, but since I've been here, they've all been talking about weird energy or something. Though that might just be them not used to having me around the house anymore."

Adam made an exasperated sound. "Oh _come on_ , Blue. How long did you live here? I can't believe you of all people believes this sort of thing."

 _My sort of thing,_ Gansey thought to himself as Blue shot back, "Yeah well, you never believed in anything, Adam."

"You used to be a skeptic too."

"Teenage rebellion. You can't grow up in a house of psychics without noticing eventually that magic is real."

Adam laughed exasperatedly, annoyed and earnest in a way Gansey hadn't seen from him before. "You know there's a reason for that, Blue. It's the law of small numbers; if your personal experience with predictions seems to lean towards being accurate, your perception—"

"Thanks for that, I took Intro to Logic in college too, Adam," Blue cut him off, impressively pissed off. Adam had the decency to look embarrassed. Gansey stifled a laugh.

"And anyway, that's the thing," she said, walking up the steps towards house. "They were never wrong."

* * *

It was night and the long shadows of Adam and Gansey's shared motel room were broken by the dim glare of Adam's cracked open laptop.

He couldn't stop thinking about seeing Ronan on that country road. His unbroken gaze, the absurdity of the BMW against the backdrop of the southern no man's land. It couldn't be a coincidence. He had done a quick Google search of Lynch's name but it yielded very little in the way of results. An old Henrietta newspaper article about his father's death (Adam had been aware of that back then, but just barely. It had happened before he got into Aglionby), his name had worked its way into a few pieces on his older brother's political career, on his younger brother's stint as college lacrosse player. But any information on Ronan himself seemed to have managed to stay off of the limitless reaches of the Internet. As far as Adam could tell, he didn't even have a YouTube account. At least not one under his own name.

A search into his arrest records indicated some reckless driving and possible alcoholism, but nothing particularly sinister looking. It all seemed pretty in line with the concept of Ronan that Adam had had in high school, the kind of boy bored with the world if he wasn't getting a rush from adrenaline or drugs, who was rich enough to forget that actions sometimes had consequences. Rich enough that they didn't have to.

It was a certain type of wealthy Adam had seen plenty of at Aglionby, infuriating but hardly uncommon or particularly malicious. So what if Ronan hadn't moved as far away from Aglionby as Adam felt the school merited? So what if he had been driving through dark forest roads in the evening? Maybe he was going for a hike.

And maybe he wasn't. If Adam's scientific background had taught him one thing, it was to not hastily negate a possibility. At the very least, maybe he had seen something they hadn't.

Adam still hadn't discussed this with Gansey and he could feel Gansey's annoyance at this fact. It was a little disconcerting; he was so used to Gansey's good-natured ambivalence towards any adversity that being the apparent catalyst of this bad mood was particularly concerning.

His partner was on the other side of the room, sitting on his bed and also pounding away at his laptop, though Adam expected he was taking the search in a different sort of direction.

The psychics had hardly contributed anything Adam would have considered particularly helpful, but a few hesitantly vague comments about energy and power in addition to Blue's remark earlier seemed to have excited Gansey immeasurably.

He would stop scrolling through his laptop every so often, however, to frown a bit and tap on the edge of the screen with his thumb in agitation. He was doing this now.

"So," Gansey said eventually, breaking the silence they had fallen into since they had gotten to the motel room. "You grew up in Henrietta."

It was both an accusation and a truth.

Adam nodded. "I did."

"And you didn't tell me because?" Gansey's voice was frostier than Adam had ever heard it. It infuriated him, that Gansey thought he deserved answers when he barely knew him, that he thought he owed his life story to anyone at all.

"It didn't seem important to the case," he replied coldly.

"Important to the case?" Gansey shot back. "It was important enough for you to lie about!"

Adam shut his laptop. Gansey looked small, somehow, half hidden by shadow, face illuminated by the glowing light of his computer screen. "I never lied."

"You hid the truth on purpose," Gansey said, closing his own computer. "You went out of your way to make sure I didn't know. And you _know_ something; I saw your face when we drove by that car. How am I supposed to work with you when I can't trust you?"

Adam rose furiously, glaring at the dim reflection of himself in the motel window, his long features a lonely ghost against the outdoors. Every muscle in his body strained. He wanted to yell, he wanted to punch something, and it only made him angrier that he wouldn't let himself do either.

He spun around to face Gansey. "Give me your keys."

"Pardon?" said Gansey, ever the image of southern gentility even in distress.

"The Camaro. I'm going to show you something."

Wordlessly, Gansey fished through his pocket for the keys and placed them in Adam's outstretched hand. Adam was a little surprised. He had a feeling Gansey wouldn't have parted with the keys to the Camaro if it hadn't been for how the feeling stirring in Adam's chest must have been manifesting itself on his face.

He left the motel room. He knew he looked a bit in disarray, the jacket of his neat suit had been removed, his sleeves pushed up, the tie abandoned entirely, but he couldn't bring himself to care. Gansey was in a similar state but, as always, it looked infuriatingly good on him.

Old as it was, the '73 Camaro was not the most expensive car Adam had ever driven, but more expensive than any he had owned. The recklessness of excess was a fear he could never learn to find exhilarating, the keys to a sports car too often returned to the hands of a sales associate after a test drive, the beating of his heart berating him, _This is what you wanted, this is what you dreamed of, what was it you were working for if you're too afraid to grab hold of it—_

Adam hardly had to pay attention to where he was going. He had never driven these streets, so muscle memory in its most basic sense did him no good, but eighteen years of biking them served him nearly as well. He could focus instead on the Camaro's sputtering but powerful scream, the furious blur of the passing countryside, and the feeling that he was seeing history dissolving around him, that the past that had remained a stagnant thing in his heart for ten years had climbed its choking fingers around his throat at long last.

He almost hadn't noticed pressing the brakes. He almost hadn't noticed that he had come back home.

Gansey looked uncomfortably out the car window and Adam suddenly and forcefully regretted bringing him here. Gansey with his tousled hair and lovely honey-saturated accent and his bright orange car in the backdrop of Adam's dusty childhood felt like an infuriating anachronism.

"You wanted the truth from me," he said, trying to make the words biting, but he found he wasn't angry enough for it anymore. "This is it." His eyes darted around the trailer park, searching, out of masochistic curiosity, for his old home. It occurred to him suddenly that he didn't know if his parents still lived here.

Gansey didn't say anything. He looked at the faded lights from the trailers dispassionately, cold stars in a polluted darkness, and waited for Adam to go on.

"You wanted to know why I wouldn't tell you where I came from," he said, for once not fighting his accent's acquisition of the sharper vocal inflections he had trained himself to obtain. "It's because I've been spending the past ten years trying to forget."

He didn't know how to continue, but he wanted Gansey to _understand_. What it was to be trapped here, to be told that possibility was a concept for other people but never himself, and choosing to fight his way out anyway. What it had meant to knot an Aglionby tie every morning with hands he had just washed grease and oil from, to have fought his way even through college with a scholarship that hadn't been enough.

How long he had kept eighteen years of memories like a shameful secret. How long it had been since he had felt like anyone had known him at all.

Instead, he said "I guess I like to pretend that my life started at Harvard. I guess that's pretty stupid."

Something shifted and softened in Gansey's eyes. Adam braced himself for pity, but he didn't think this was it.

"Switch places with me," Gansey said. "It's my turn to drive."

* * *

Adam didn't recognize the location Gansey drove them to, further up into the mountains with lusher vegetation and an unobstructed view of the stars, but he was grateful to be out of the trailer park.

"One of Virginia's Top 25 Most Scenic Locations," Gansey informed him, pulling the car over and stepping out. "I read it in a blog post when I was researching the ley lines around here. Though I suppose it's not the most official source," he added with a frown.

"It's still nice," Adam said politely as he followed, a bit confused.

"We didn't have to take this case you know," Gansey said suddenly. "I was the one who convinced the FBI to let us work it because I thought it looked like an X-File. If you had told me you couldn't do it… well, I hope I would have let it drop. You wouldn't have had to tell me why."

He looked enormously displeased as he stared down, past the edge of the mountain, to the slowly dimming lights of the town below, but Adam realized that it was probably with himself and not Adam, an anxiety that he had failed to be accommodating, that his enthusiasm had been harmful.

He was still a little annoyed with Gansey; he doubted that he would ever _stop_ being a little annoyed with Gansey, but he also couldn't bear to see him like this. This, of all things, hadn't been his fault.

"That's not it," he said, in what he hoped was a reassuring manner. "I wanted to see how this case turned out as much as you did." It was the truth, which surprised him a little as he said it.

"Even if it was just some high kid wandering around lost in a forest?" Gansey said wryly.

" _Especially_ if it was a high kid lost in a forest," he said, though his original hypothesis seemed more and more unlikely. "We all deserve simple answers once in a while."

"All of this," Gansey said, "the fish, that tree, what those boys saw, how those psychics felt." As he listed this off he gestured widely, to the town below, the mountains surrounding them, the infinite stars above, and Adam was a little touched by the sense that he thought of them all as the same thing. "What do you think of that? I've never… I'd like to understand."

Adam was once again reminded of the Gansey, pale and lifeless, he had seen in the tree.

"I don't think it's all that different than what you believe in. There are answers for everything, systems and rules we don't know yet that define the most inexplicable of phenomena. That's all. I just think there are answers besides 'aliens'."

"And your systems and rules totally discount the possibility of any kind of extraterrestrial existence?"

Adam smiled a bit. "No, I suppose not inherently."

He had expected Gansey to react to this, but instead, the other man merely continued to gaze out at the expanse of stars before them, hands in his pockets and with a troubled quirk to his mouth.

"Have I ever told you told how my… _interest_ in this sort of thing began?"

Adam shook his head. To be honest, he hadn't put much thought in it, assuming it stemmed from a bored childhood with enough leisure time and funding to pursue the most eccentric of hobbies. A childish interest that had worked its way into a career.

"And no one ever said anything to you about it?"

He shook his head again.

Gansey laughed mildly, but it had an ironic quality that disturbed Adam a bit. "Well, I suppose I should appreciate that. I'm not entirely oblivious; I know how it all sounds. It's an old story, but I've never gotten as good at telling it as you would think."

They stood like that for a while, quietly in the cooling summer air, until Gansey spoke again.

"I was ten years old. It was August, I think, because we were staying at my parents' summer home near Chesapeake. I remember I was excited about that trip because my sister had promised me she was finally going to try to teach me to sail around the bay." He gave a self-conscious smile, still looking more towards the distant lights of Henrietta than at Adam. Adam was met with the uncomfortable feeling of being an outsider in a conversation that was directed at him. "I was awful at it, of course, and it all seems a little exorbitant in hindsight, that we owned a boat for a house we only visited every other year. But I was excited for another reason, too: there was a family that always also vacationed in a house near ours, and they had a son my age. The Czernys.

"Noah was that kind of hyper kid that always had some scheme he wanted to hatch, and even better, was determined to put whatever kind of wild scheme I had into action. It was the best kind of summer for two boys: a massive waterfront before us, woods behind us, and the time and resources to get up to any kind of trouble we could think of. Of course, it wasn't enough. Our parents were all far too permissive; they were more interested in talking business and drinking cocktails than keeping any real kind of eye on us, so to meet that childish urge to break the rules we went to different measures.

"Nothing too ridiculous," he added hastily. "We thought we were pretty clever, though looking back it was stupid and dangerous for two ten-year-olds to try without adult supervision. We snuck out in the middle of the night and hijacked my family's boat to try to sail through the bay by ourselves. Anyway, it was actually going well enough; I was still awful at sailing of course, but Noah's family visited a few times every year so he knew what he was doing. More than me, that is. It had gotten to a point where we were really just floating around and laying out under the stars and talking—we probably would have fallen asleep eventually and I can only imagine the disaster that would have created when we woke up. It was all very stupid really. But it didn't get to that point, unfortunately, because of what happened next."

Gansey had turned from the mountain overhang, speaking directly to Adam now, and Adam had the weird, sinking feeling that he knew what was coming, even if he couldn't quite place the words for it.

"At first I thought there was some kind of huge boat passing by, that its lights were bright enough to be blinding, that the roar I heard was from some kind of engine. Everything happened so fast. I hardly had time to register it before it was over. But it was unmistakable: a giant object hung in suspension over the boat, a sudden burst of light so strong the very water around me seemed to be glowing, and then, nothing at all. A few moments of the object disappearing from view and the sudden realization that Noah was gone, that he had gone with it. It was a nightmare trying to get back by myself, and a nightmare trying to explain what I had seen. 'Abduction' is a loaded word, Adam, I know; too cliché to even be used as a cheesy Hollywood trope these days, but I know what I saw. And for these past eighteen years, I've only found more and more to confirm it."

 _Oh Gansey_ , Adam thought sadly, because it was all too easy to see how this had come to be, to piece the puzzle together to see the true image of what had happened that night: two boys, a tragic boating accident, the sole witness so young and scared and guilt-ridden that he had conjured up a fantasy straight out of a comic book, an insistence that it had been _anything else_ that he clung to even in adulthood.

But he didn't say that, because it was all too clear Gansey had been told this dozens of times before, had sat through a childhood of well-meaning attempts to explain his past to which he had paid no heed. And because Gansey looked at him now with a sort of earnest embarrassment that told him he expected to hear the same thing again, but hoped that he wouldn't.

"I'm sorry," he said, because he was, "that you lost your friend. I think I understand now."

They both smiled a little sadly and gazed out to infinity before them. Maybe the endless expanse, the contradiction of light and darkness, held all the answers they were searching for, and maybe it held none at all. The suspense of possibility was both thrilling and calming, and for the first time, Adam thought he understood Richard Gansey perfectly.

* * *

As leads went, Gansey had definitely seen better, and he was someone who made his living off of the wildest of extrapolations. Still, with the blood sample languishing in a lab and the psychics relatively non-forthcoming, there wasn't much to do other than hunt down every lead they had.

"There are houses around here?" he asked, a bit skeptic. These long, rural roads didn't exactly scream of civilization, but then again, he had never lived in the countryside.

"That's what Google Maps says," Adam said with a shrug.

"And your old high school friend will be here?"

"He's not my friend. And he should be."

Something had shifted after last night, and Gansey wasn't sure if it had made things better or worse. For the first time, he was on his way to a real understanding of Adam Parrish beyond what their uncomfortable partnership had necessitated, and he thought that maybe Adam was beginning to feel it too. Pretending their dynamic was the same would be a ridiculous façade, but it was unclear what this meant for _now_.

But that wasn't important right now. The priority was to focus on their jobs, to chase the facts of the case at every turn they could. Which currently meant trying to track down Ronan Lynch, Adam's former Aglionby classmate, with his handsome sharp features and apparent former talent for getting into trouble of all kinds. When Adam had finally relayed this knowledge the night before, he had been the first to admit that the lead seemed dubious at best. Despite his show of acceptance of Gansey's past, it was clear Adam still couldn't bring himself to believe this was anything other than a homicide or kidnapping, and even with his track record with the law, there was nothing about Lynch that suggested someone that had much to do with either of those. There was a world of difference between chronic public intoxication and child murder.

Gansey, meanwhile, was beginning to suspect more and more that this story had a different sort of ending. He had no solid idea yet how Wealthy Amateur Street Racer Ronan Lynch fit into the extraterrestrial abduction narrative he was mentally piecing together, but he very much doubted that he had just been happening along by the scene of the crime when Adam and Gansey had seen him. More likely, he was there for similar reasons as they, to make sense of what had happened. Gansey felt a guilty rush of excitement at the prospect of finding someone who could confirm his suspicions, the possibility of a witness to whatever had taken place that night who needed answers of his own. He didn't let himself think about the other possibility stewing in the back of his mind: that this could be something more than even that, a piece of whatever larger conspiracy was allowing this to happen in the first place. It was a terrifying and exhilarating possibility, and Gansey was beginning to realize that as much as he yearned for answers, he feared them too. He had spent so long trying to find out what had happened to Noah that night and he was only now beginning to remember what a terribly final thing the truth could be.

The winding road was calming into a much steadier and subtle slope, taking them through a charming combination of forests and patchwork farmland.

"This is it," Adam said eventually. "Or the address I have, anyway."

Gansey suspected he added this last bit because the place they had arrived at was doing a very poor job of reflecting Gansey's second-hand perception of Ronan Lynch.

First of all, it was a farm, and an apparently active one at that. Cows milled lazily through well-tended green pastures and there was definitely some kind of plant growing in the dirt beyond them. It was an inherited estate but Gansey had grown up wealthy as well and had grown used to the long careful fields that defined the agricultural inclinations of the wealthy. This was not that.

The land was dotted with small barns in various states of disarray, electrons haphazardly encircling the nucleus of the larger main house.

"Charming," Gansey remarked because it really was. There was a feeling here, a knowledge that this was just one beautiful piece of something much, much larger, that was a little intoxicating. He stepped out of the Camaro and, alongside Adam, made his way across the pasture to the main house.

He heard Adam cough a little in a way that didn't so much suggest that he was sick than it did that he wanted Gansey to see something.

He only caught a glimpse of it—well, "her" was probably the better pronoun to use in this case, though he had never seen a girl quite like this before—before she disappeared into the woods behind one of the barns.

"Was that..." Adam began slowly.

"It was," Gansey answered softly.

The girl had probably been about 14 years old. Her blonde hair had been sloppily cut close to her head and she had a giant orange t-shirt that had clashed horribly with her striped purple and green skirt. The notable thing, however, was directly below the skirt: a pair of furry goat legs.

A girl like her had been mentioned in one of the conspiracy theorist articles he had read about Henrietta. The girl in that account had been younger, but the article had been a few years old. Gansey wasn't an idiot; he didn't trust everything he read, but it seemed that this account had been true.

"So," Adam said, clearly unable to resist. "Is that what aliens look like, then?"

Gansey shook his head slowly, eyes fixed on the spot where the girl had been. Maybe they did. He really didn't know. The one thing he did know, that he was suddenly more certain of than he had ever been in his life, was that there was so much more to the world than anyone had ever been willing to tell him, so much more than anyone would ever know, and here he was, after years of desperate searching, finally on the threshold of it all.

He took a step towards the barn the girl had disappeared behind.

"Gansey," Adam said and Gansey could hear the caution in his voice. They really shouldn't spend any more time on the property than necessary until the owner gave them permission to look around, but possibility was too close to possibly resist it. He made his way into the barn. The door was open anyway, though it was a flimsy excuse.

It was dark inside but, between the thin rays of afternoon light that crept in through the shafts and something bright and spinning in the corner, there was enough light to see by. Rows upon rows of tables piled high with objects of all sorts, some moving, some not, lined the walls and then zig-zagged their way through the rest of it, with just enough room to walk through. This was a place that had clearly been used as a barn at one point or another, but that was not its purpose now.

He wasn't exactly sure where to look; this small space was suddenly a whirring of movement and impossibility. Here was a knife that seemed to be slowly burning a hole into a table, here was a pen that wrote the same profane word again and again all by itself, here was something that at once seemed to be screaming and to be very quiet. It was all so thrilling he was a little afraid he might be sick; it was the same feeling he had had in the forest, looking at the fish.

 _This is real. This is real. This is real._

He turned to call Adam in, but the other man was already inside, staring at the contents of the barn. He wore a blank expression that did not seem to be so much because of an absence of feeling, but rather, because of the presence of too much emotion to possibly know what to do with.

He met Gansey's eyes.

 _This is real._

"We need to go," Adam said, so they did.

Gansey was getting more and more excited as they approached the house and he could see Adam getting more and more perplexed, brow knotting in increased consideration over what they had just seen.

He rapped on the front door, two curt knocks.

There was silence for a moment, then a few steps. The door swung open to reveal a man in his late twenties with piercing blue eyes and a shaved head. He was the man he had seen in the BMW. Ronan Lynch.

"I'm Agent Gansey and this is my partner, Agent Parrish," Gansey pulled out his identification badge and Adam did the same. "Do you mind if we ask you a few questions?"

The door had shut in his face before he had time to register what was happening.

After a moment, Adam sighed and knocked again. "You're not in any trouble; we just think you might have some information that could be helpful with an ongoing investigation." Nothing. "You're well within your rights to consult with an attorney if you like, but there's no point in avoiding us forever. We'll just come back with a warrant."

There was an even longer pause, and then the door opened again.

"What the fuck do you want?"

"Ah," said Gansey. "My favorite way to begin a conversation."

* * *

In an unanticipated turn of events, Lynch had actually let them into his house. It was nice enough, Gansey supposed, but far more in tune with his perception of Lynch's character than the surrounding farmland. He was sitting in a comfortable looking green plush chair, with Adam and Gansey in the couch across from him.

"So," Lynch said. He had been eyeing Adam in a dismissive way that suggested that he was trying to size him up, but was so unimpressed that he wasn't sure if it was a task worth continuing. "Long time no see."

"Since graduation?" Every one of Adam's mannerisms was polite, but there was an unmistakably cool edge to his tone.

"Longer than that. I dropped out as soon as I turned 18." There was a hostility, a derisive source of judgment on Lynch's face that Gansey didn't understand.

"Oh," Adam said uncomfortably and the small talk was over.

"We'd like to ask you a few questions," Gansey said, as he had before. "About the area and if you've observed anything unusual lately."

Lynch raised an eyebrow, a well-rehearsed gesture that masterfully articulated a precise combination of question and disdain. "Like what?"

"Just anything you wouldn't expect to see around Henrietta," supplied Adam. "You know, increased activity around this area, suspicious looking men—"

"You mean besides the ones already sitting in my living room?"

Gansey cleared his throat a little, trying to figure out how to best alleviate the tension. "Look, Mr. Lynch, we're just trying to find a missing person. I imagine this has very little to do with you but if you have seen anything—"

"And I'm telling you I don't know what the hell you guys think I should have seen." Lynch stood up angrily, looking jagged and fearsome, and Gansey could tell that he was about to show them the door.

"Bright lights," Gansey shot in, and he didn't have to look over to feel Adam's sigh. "Traces of strange rocks you haven't seen in your soil before? Glimpses of things in the sky you can't quite explain?"

"That's not really—" Adam began, but he cut off as hesitation shifted across Lynch's face. It was only for a moment, but it was a sort of surprise that was unmistakable: something Gansey had said had struck a chord.

He laughed suddenly, as unperturbed as if the moment had never happened. "The fuck do you guys think you're looking for out here?"

"I'm not quite sure," Gansey said and now he was standing too. "In fact, I'm willing to bet you have a better idea than us. Because whatever this it, it's not something you're completely surprised by, is it? The sort of thing that fits in well with strange little girls and barns full of other things people think don't exist."

This had been the wrong thing to say. Gansey had known this before he even opened his mouth and yet he had said it anyway. It was unlike him; normally regret and realization only came after he had observed the reaction to his poorly timed, poorly constructed words. He had gotten too excited and too frustrated, thrilled by the idea of finally having answers and too quick to grab at them before they could slip away.

Lynch tensed. "Get the fuck out."

"He didn't mean to—" Adam began hastily.

"I said," he snapped, "Get the fuck out. I know you think I'm some kind of idiot because you knew me ten years ago and I wasn't on the goddamn honor roll like you, but I can think of at least two constitutional amendments that give me the right to tell you to get the fuck out right now."

"Alright," said Adam, rising as well. "Don't need to tell us twice."

Adam and Gansey made their way to the door uncomfortably, Gansey feeling horribly embarrassed. They had certainly dealt with some hostile witnesses before, but none that Gansey had personally upset.

"Oh yeah and uh…" Lynch began before closing the door and then hesitated, squinting a bit at Adam.

"Parrish," said Adam.

"Parrish," he said. "Tell your friend to stay out of my fucking barns." With that, he shut the door with a thud and all was quiet except for angry footsteps and the distant sounds of the cows.

"I'm… um. Sorry about that," Gansey said sheepishly. "That was my fault. I got too excited."

To his surprise, Adam merely shrugged, stuffing his hands in his pockets and turning his head up to stare at the furious sun as he walked back to the car. "He was never going to give us any information anyway. If you hadn't pissed him off, I'm sure I would have two seconds later. I don't care what he says; that entire scene was exactly like the kid I remember from high school.

"But," he continued, shifting so he was meeting Gansey's eyes. "You definitely touched on something there. With, well, whatever that was. All of the UFO type stuff or whatever we saw in those barns. I don't know what all of that meant but it meant something to him. There's no way that's unrelated."

Adam looked as excited by this, the piecing together some unknown puzzle, the beginning of a shape that looked like it might contain answers, as Gansey felt. Emotion pulled viciously at his chest at the eagerness on his partner's face. This is what he had been waiting for: for the promise of solutions to finally outweigh the impossibility of it all.

"Well, we need to get a warrant first of all," Adam was saying. "To see if we can make sense of any of that stuff."

This was where Gansey's personal experience came in handy. "And how are we going to get that? What's our reasonable suspicion to search the house?"

"What do you mean? You saw the…" Adam's voice petered off. "Shit."

"First rule of investigating paranormal bullshittery is that no one is ever going to believe you actually saw paranormal bullshittery," Gansey sighed.

Adam let out an exasperated breath. "Then we're totally stuck. We've lost all our leads."

"Mm," Gansey said. "Not quite."

"What do you mean?"

He grinned guiltily, reaching into his pocket to grab the small object he knew was still there. The pen twitched feebly in his fingers but Gansey knew the motion it was trying to make. It was the same word it had been scrawling over the wall of the barn when he had grabbed it. "Second rule of investigating paranormal bullshittery: Break the rules. No one will believe whoever said you did."

* * *

They were back at the pizza place where they had initially questioned the Aglionby boys. Adam wasn't quite sure what kept drawing him back to the restaurant; it was even dingier than it had been when he had lived in Henrietta. The plastic booth cushions had cracked and torn in ways that made it was impossible not to resist picking at, the neon sign that once proclaimed "Nino's" now only boasted a tired "no", and frankly the food just wasn't what it had once been. It had proved enough that it looked like the Aglionby elite had since abandoned the site as the preferred haunt of the wealthy and bored, and had moved on to different venues, ones where the cuisine was slightly less burnt.

In the end, Adam supposed he was drawn here because it held all the best memories of his teenage years. It had been here that he had maintained the uncomfortable and distant friendships with his classmates that had helped him get through high school. It had been here that he had found refuge in between shifts at work, was able to grab a slice of pizza when he couldn't deny himself a boost of energy any longer. It had been here that he had first approached Blue, his eventual companion in disdain for Henrietta and a need for something more, as she sat down for her break from her waitressing job. This seemed like the proper spot for a rendezvous. More importantly, it seemed like a proper spot for waiting, for all the parts in between.

Something inside him was still frozen over what he had seen on the Lynch property. He had wanted answers (not expected them, but desired them nonetheless), but the last thing he needed was more questions.

Still, questions were the reason Adam had gone into this line of work in the first place. He had forgotten that, hadn't he? Somewhere along the line, his life had become about the immediateness of results and not the hopeful buzz of potential. _You love questions,_ he reminded himself in a detached sort of way, _because you love to find their answers. It's a game; there are so many things we don't know and in your head, you have the tools to find them all._

So what were the answers, then? How did he approach this equation? There were solutions here besides what Gansey thought they had to be. For thousands of years, people thought the sun was made of fire and pulled by a man in a chariot—they thought when the earth shook, it meant the gods were angry. Magic had never been an answer; it was a Band-Aid meant to cover the problems no one knew how to solve.

A hundred objects had been spinning with light and wonder and mystery inside of that barn, and they were no different than the sun. There was an answer behind each one of them and Adam Parrish would know them all.

A single fact gnawed on the thought in the back of his mind, quietly doing its best to undo his resolution from the shadows. It was this: Ronan Lynch reportedly lived alone, and he wasn't a scientist. None of the phenomena Adam had witnessed had been conjured in test tubes or laboratories. _Then by what? Magic?_

He wanted to ask Gansey about this; the crack in his former resolve would be embarrassing but he didn't think Gansey would be _too_ infuriatingly smug, but he was still trying to consolidate his thoughts enough to turn them into any kind of helpful question.

Anyway, he had been cut short by Blue, who was sliding in next to him.

"Can't say I miss this place," she said with a glance to the overhead fluorescent lights. She set a small Ziploc bag on the table between the three of them.

Gansey made a grab for the bag before the pen inside could start its attempt to scrawl profanity over the tables. It would have made very little difference, Adam noticed, looking down at the incessant, vicious markings, already penned into the booth.

"Blue," Gansey said with one of his amiable smiles that could easily charm most people.

Blue Sargent, however, was not most people. She relinquished a terse tug of her lips and a raise of her eyebrows.

"Find anything?" Adam asked. There were still some benefits of being an ex-boyfriend to the non-psychic daughter of psychics. For instance, Adam was still quite handy at reading tarot; he had made sure to bring up what a load of shit he believed it was before ever doing a reading, but it was still a big hit at parties. Most relevant though, was that he could ask Blue for favors like this.

 _One of the women who lived at 300 Fox Way specialized in a certain kind of reading, he had told Gansey after getting off the phone with Blue. She could hold an object and learn things about it, its history, its qualities, its owner, simply from touch alone._

 _"That doesn't seem like the kind of thing you would believe in," Gansey had said._

 _"It's not," Adam said. But he had made the call anyway._

Blue made a sort of _huh!_ noise before drumming her closely clipped fingernails on the table and muttering, "Well, I should say so!"

"I'm not sure I catch your meaning," Gansey said politely.

"Where did you guys say you got this again?"

"A witness," Adam provided.

"And just where did _he_ say he got it?"

"He didn't," said Gansey.

"Good answer," Blue said with a hint of drama. "Because you're right; he didn't. Get it from anywhere at all, I mean."

Adam frowned. "Alright, now _I'm_ not sure I catch your meaning."

"I'm getting to it." She grinned mirthfully. "You'll really get a kick out of this one: it's from a dream."

"At the risk of being redundant," said Gansey, "there seems to be a common theme of confusion throughout the conversation on my and Adam's part. I hope you'll forgive me for asking what exactly that means."

Blue reached over to steal a sip of Adam's soda. "You have about as good of an idea as I do, unfortunately. Whatever it is, it was created in a dream, some plane of… otherness, subconscious I guess—it's been a long time since I dealt with this kind of stuff—and then brought back into this one."

Adam looked sharply to Gansey, who was gazing carefully at Blue and gently running his thumb along the edge of his bottom lip in concentration. "Have you heard of anything like this before?"

"No… not like this. Although, there are centuries of records of inexplicable phenomena, things that shouldn't exist but did, and I wouldn't be terribly surprised if this sort of thing was at the root of most of them."

Adam turned towards Blue. She considered for a moment and then shook her head. "No, I haven't either. But like your friend said, there's a lot of weird stuff out there that just exists anyway."

"The bizarre part is," Gansey thought out loud, "that if something like this exists, something that can bring things from one plane of existence to another, well, then there's really no end of possibilities for something like that. You could create gold, perfect art forgeries," he flourished his hands as he spoke as if he was attempting pull thoughts from the air, "even nuclear warheads, god forbid. So why did we find a barn full of impossible trinkets instead of the center of a black market enterprise? Who uses this power to make novelty pens?"

"Ronan Lynch," Adam said quietly. Things were coming together in the strangest ways. Yes, those objects had not been conjured in test tubes or laboratories, but whatever quality had brought them forth could be, he was sure of it. Whether it was genetic, chemical, there was a quality in the make-up of the universe that allowed for this to exist. It could be found, figured out, if not by him, then by someone, eventually.

"Adam," Gansey said suddenly. "I can't believe I'm about to say this, but I don't think this has anything to do with our case."

"What?" This had been the last thing he'd expected.

"Think about it—what does this have to do with anything? A missing teen and a farmer who can pull things from dreams; I don't see what the relation is other than their unusualness and the proximity in which they occurred."

"I thought you didn't believe in coincidences."

"I don't, but two strange things occurring in the same place doesn't always mean they're related."

"That's what a coincidence is!"

"Boys, boys," Blue said affably. "As entertaining as this squabbling is, I haven't finished telling you about your mystery pen and I believe this might help put the argument to rest."

Adam and Gansey turned to her as she took a deep breath and continued. "Believe it or not, this is where it gets even weirder. The energy coming from this pen… it's dream energy, but it's been corrupted. I'm not sure what that means either," she added hastily as the two men opened their mouths in unison. "I guess it's like if… say you just bought a really nice car. It's new, it's shiny—basically the best state a car can be in. That's what the energy from this pen, from dreams, _should_ be like. But then some jackass comes in and starts messing with your engine—or whatever, I don't really know anything about cars."

"Good choice in metaphor then," Adam quipped, and she glared at him before carrying on. It was a playful glare though, despite herself, so he smiled a little, despite himself.

"The point is, that at first glance, it's fine on the outside, exactly what it should like look like, but the moment you dig any deeper, you find out that there's something twisted and awful."

"There's something evil in this _pen_?" Gansey asked.

"No, not the pen, the pen's energy. I can't say much because it's not like Calla had another object from a dream she could compare it to, but the sense she got was that this isn't how a dream object should be. These objects are being moved from another plane of existence, but there's something in that other plane corrupting it and tearing it apart."

Adam and Gansey exchanged a tense look.

"Well that certainly sounds dire," Gansey began, "but I'm still not sure how it connects this to the case. Unless you think this… _corruption_ is what happened to Turner?"

"I don't know about that part," Blue admitted, "but there's one more factor connecting these two things. This wasn't the first time Calla and my mom and the rest of psychics have felt this weird, bastardized energy. It's like I was telling you yesterday, apparently, something like this has been stirring around Henrietta for a while and has only gotten stronger recently."

"Meaning whatever is corrupting dreams on this 'other plane'…" Adam began.

Blue nodded. "It's here, too. Or arriving here at any rate, whatever that really means."

"It sounds like it's probably bad," Gansey said frankly.

Blue ignored this. "Magic, or whatever you want to call it," she added for Adam's benefit, "has been stirring in ways it hasn't for years. I can't feel it and you can't feel it, but it's happening anyway. And the source of this energy, where all of this seems to be culminating, is right over there." She nodded to the side a bit, an absentminded presentation. "The forest."

"Right where the kid disappeared," Adam murmured.

"Bingo."

He stood up, already trying to wave down the waitress so they could get their check. "We need to go now. Back to Lynch's house, I mean."

"Because that was such a success when we tried it two hours ago?" Gansey said incredulously.

"Two hours ago we were government agents dangerously close to finding out about an ability that no one should have. He didn't know how we'd react to that. Now, we know, and more importantly, we know the fabric of the universe is in danger or something. If this has already been happening on this dream plane, then he's bound to know more than we do, and since he lives on this side of existence, he's bound to want it to stop."

Something shifted in Gansey's eyes for a moment and Adam had the uncomfortable feeling of realizing that he, not his statement, was the thing in consideration.

"That's a bit of a leap for you, isn't it?" Gansey said thoughtfully. "To assume that he would want to help fix things."

Adam didn't say anything. It was a leap for him, but he knew it wasn't for Gansey.

The other man straightened his tie and stood up. "From whence we came then, I suppose."

Blue cleared her throat. "Not so fast. I'm coming with you."

Gansey blinked. "Why?"

"Because you two are about to poke your nose into the realm of the supernatural without knowing anything about it at all, so you're going to need someone who does."

"I thought you _weren't_ psychic," Gansey said accusingly and Adam groaned internally. Way to hit a sore spot. Her lack of psychic ability had never necessarily bothered Blue, or at least she had insisted that it didn't, but being the only one not tuned into the same otherworldly frequencies as the rest of her family had not been fun for her regardless.

"I'm _not_ ," she snapped, "but I grew up around this kind of thing."

"The pulling-things-out-of-dreams kind of thing?"

Blue bit her lip. "No," she admitted.

"Then there's no reason for a civilian to come along on this kind of thing," Gansey said dismissively. "I've spent the better part of my life learning everything about the paranormal that I can, so I think I'm just as likely to be helpful, and without potentially putting the lives of non-agents in danger."

Blue turned, clearly frustrated, towards Adam, who put his hands defensively in the air. "Sorry Blue, but he's right. I can give you a call if we end up needing your expertise, but otherwise, I can't justify bringing you along. Things could get ugly."

She frowned, but looked a little placated at the reference to "her expertise".

"Fine," she said, exasperated. "Just give me a call if anything comes up."

"Will do," Adam said and he and Gansey began to make their way out the door.

"And Adam?"

He turned. "Yeah?"

She gave a sad, half amused sort of smile. "Give me a call when this is all over, too. Just to check in. Don't go disappearing for another ten years."

Adam paused for a moment, past and future hanging between them. There were so many memories he would like to forget, but really, this wasn't one of them. He could be choosy about what parts of his life he wanted to revisit; he was allowed that.

He smiled fondly. "Okay."

* * *

The road was as winding as ever, but this time it was ever so slightly more familiar, so Gansey could manage for the most part without Google Maps.

Which was a good thing, because his reception really was crap out here.

"So the plan?"

"The _plan_ is to try to get any information possible about what's going on here so _then_ we can make a plan to deal with it."

Gansey bit his lip and exhaled, eyes still on the road. "And if it's too late by then? We have no way of feeling how fast all of... _this_ is progressing."

Adam squirmed in the passenger seat. He clearly didn't like the idea of going into this blind any more than Gansey did. Probably even less, actually; by this point, Gansey had gotten used to trying to feel his way to answers with the least information possible.

"Well, what's your solution then?"

"I don't suppose I have one. I just really hate this."

Adam leaned his head back so his eyes were pointed towards the car's ceiling. "Yeah. Me too."

Neither of them asked what they would do if Ronan Lynch was as unhelpful as he had been before.

"So, uh, Blue," Gansey said.

Adam raised an eyebrow. "What about her?"

Gansey wasn't sure "what about her" he had meant. "She's nice."

The eyebrow was raised higher.

"She's _interesting_ ," Gansey corrected himself. "You two really used to date?"

Adam laughed. "That's some tone—what, do I not seem like the type to date interesting people?"

"Oh, that's not what I—" Gansey started quickly.

"No, I know what you mean. I don't know; it was ten years ago. I guess we had a little more in common then, but it was still mostly centered on how much we both wanted to get out of Henrietta."

But Blue had come back, Gansey noted. She had moved on while maintaining a relationship with the place that had grown her while Adam avoided it at all costs. Even then, they hadn't been quite the same.

"It still seems like you care about each other, though."

"I mean, yeah I guess." Adam fidgeted with his seatbelt. "To tell you the truth, I hadn't really thought about her in years." He paused. "What are you getting at?"

What _was_ he getting at? Gansey had felt bothered by Adam and Blue's familiarity, their past, in ways he hadn't expected to be. He had no right to these feelings, to distaste at their relationship when it was so clearly one of the few good things Adam had had in this place, and he couldn't understand them either. His mind flitted, against his best efforts, to the vision he had had in the hollow old tree before he forced it away. _Keep your mind on driving, Gansey_.

"Oh, I don't know. Simple curiosity."

They were silent for a moment, watching the blur of trees and farmland around them, before Adam said, "Blue and I—that's over. It's been over for a decade. It's nice to see her again, but that's it. Really."

Gansey wasn't sure what to say to this, so he said nothing at all. He didn't know what had prompted Adam to say it and, glancing over at his partner, it looked like he didn't know either.

The moment was cut short, however, by the harsh ringing of Adam's phone. He removed it from his pocket and then glanced tersely at Gansey.

"It's the lab."

Gansey nodded, a gesture that said _Well then, answer it._

He waited while Adam _mmhm_ 'd and _oh really_ 'd through the call.

"Well," Adam said finally. "It's Turner's blood."

Gansey nodded, unsure of exactly where this information fit into the grander picture, this missing boy in the midst of the unweaving of the cosmic tapestry.

"But," Adam said, "they got some other… _interesting_ results."

"Well, you know me. I do love interesting."

"Unfamiliar elements. The blood had traces of some kind of mineral… not quite iron, but not too far either. Something with similar properties that they had never seen before."

Gansey knew Adam was thinking about the question he had asked Lynch earlier that day. Traces of strange rocks he had never seen before. Something that seemed not quite from this world.

Adam took a deep breath. "So do you think that this is… that this is… any ideas on what this means?"

Gansey raised his eyebrows. "I think you know exactly what I think this means."

"What? Alien abduction? They put _space rocks_ in his blood? What would he even be doing back here then, after they tested on him?"

"Or maybe exposure to a certain kind of radiation affected the composition of his blood when they landed. I don't know, Adam. I'm always the first to admit when I don't really know anything at all."

There was a tense moment of silence; the conversation was clearly over. Before long, the sprawling fields and scattered farmhouses of the Barns appeared and Gansey pulled over into the property. This time, he and Adam did not linger over fanciful dream inventions or the loveliness of the fields. He knocked sharply on the door.

No response.

"Lynch!" Adam called. "Ronan! Let us in; we know what's going on. We just need your help."

There was still no response.

"Dammit," Adam muttered between clenched teeth. Gansey tried again, rapping loudly on the door.

They waited in silence for another moment.

"Gansey," Adam nodded to an empty lot outside the house. "I don't think he's here. That BMW was here the last time."

Gansey sighed. "He's really picked an ideal time to go run errands, didn't he? So what now? We can't look around any more than we already have—he made it abundantly clear that legal action would be involved if we did. But we can hardly afford to just wait around for him to come back."

Adam crossed his arms pensively. The afternoon light was beginning to wane into something like darkness and the final rays of sunlight painted honey-colored streaks into his dusty hair. "We need to go back to the forest."

Gansey nodded. It was the only real lead they had at this point-the pieces were all falling into place, but it hardly rendered their course of action any clearer. They had to have missed something, or things would make better sense in context, or... he didn't know.

"We should leave a note," he said, reaching for the small notepad he kept in his back pocket. "In case he comes back."

Adam raised his eyes at the scrap of paper. "And say what? 'Hey, same guys you kicked out earlier, except this time we know you can pull things out of dreams. Don't worry; we're not going to try to dissect you or ask you to create atomic bombs, but we do need information on what's trying to destroy the planet's energy. Give us a call and you might see one of us at future high school reunions.'?"

Gansey shrugged. "More or less."

"Oh my god." Adam laughed suddenly, hysterical and exhausted. "What the hell is the file going to look like for this case?"

* * *

Gansey distrusted time in this place. It had been clear to him during their first encounter with this part of the forest that the seasons and time of day depended more on the whims of whatever forces controlled it than the rotational movements of the earth and sun, but he would credit it with this: it certainly had a feel for aesthetic.

During their first visit, this area had somehow seemed brighter and lovelier than the parts surrounding it. Light danced around through trees and the overhanging leaves left stenciled darkness on the ground below. Now, however, it seemed that hours were passing instead of minutes. The sky had muted to a level of darkness that it had no right to be at and a grim air hung about the place. Something had changed. Perhaps it had only been their expectations, perhaps it had only been their moods, or perhaps it had been something much deeper and more terrible than that. Apprehension stuck, clumped and awful, in Gansey's throat.

This place wanted him gone.

"Gansey," Adam said lightly and nodded ahead of them. Not too far off, but distant enough to not be clear to them, a small figure stood among the trees.

 _The kid?_ Gansey glanced at Adam, who raised his eyebrows in a way that said _Let's see._

They both reached for their guns, carefully making their way through the foliage.

"I can see you too, you know; you can stop sneaking around with those _things_ out."

The voice was familiar. Beside Gansey, Adam groaned and pocketed the weapon.

"We _told_ you not to come."

"Not to come along with you on your little interrogation; you didn't say anything about the forest," Blue replied. "Besides, it's a free country and this isn't even private property. Who are you to stop me from taking a hike around the local scenery of my old hometown?"

"Well, this is a crime scene and we're the federal government," Gansey said frankly as Blue waved a dismissive hand.

"It doesn't matter; if there's something bigger going on here, then I can't just not do anything while you two wave your guns around!"

Gansey opened his mouth to tell her that it _did_ matter, that people couldn't just charge into dangerous situations without training, that structure and order existed in society for a reason: so people wouldn't get _hurt_ , but the words faltered in his mouth. Who was he to tell anyone to trust what they couldn't see? Gansey had built his life on skepticism of what the government had tried to tell him; he could hardly expect people to have a blind belief in him.

"Just... stick with us," he told her. "You don't have a weapon and you don't know when things could get dangerous."

Blue waved a small pink pocketknife in response.

"Those are illegal in Virginia," Adam said.

"Then arrest me when this is over."

Adam sighed. "Did you find anything at least?"

"You tell me," she said warily as she stepped to the side. What lay behind her looked a bit like a horror movie set that had been hurriedly dismantled. A chalk pentagram had drawn in the dirt but then scrubbed away, leaving faint imprints of white and mounds of disheveled soil. A few small animal bones littered the earth and, most terribly, a splash of deep red was soaking into the soil.

Gansey had never really seen anything like this before, not in real life anyway. There had been an occasional case he had worked involving some kind of cult, but he had been lucky enough to never get the ones that delved into the really creepy stuff. His favored brand of mysticism had seemed a little more down to earth: unknown creatures and conspiracies and life that lived where mankind could not see it. It didn't involve pentagrams and blood magic.

Until now.

"What..." The words caught in his throat. "What happened here?"

Blue crouched next to the scene, nose wrinkled in distaste. "They moved it, I think. I can't pretend to know much about this at all. My family is psychic; they're not witches."

Adam moved beside her. "Why would they do that?"

"To get better energy somewhere else, maybe? Remember back in high school how my mom would have me come with her to watch the ghosts of everyone who was going to die that year?"

"Pardon?" said Gansey, but Adam just nodded.

"This line they were walking along—the corpse road. I think it should technically run through the whole town and this forest. Stronger energy for the undead, stronger energy for rituals."

"So they moved it to be along the line," Gansey said quietly.

"Exactly."

"Alright," Adam said, stepping away from the array. "But then who exactly are 'they'? What are they trying to accomplish here by performing some ritual at the exact same place the world is falling apart?"

"They could be trying to fix it?" Gansey said hopefully and Adam laughed weakly.

"Well that would certainly be nice," he said, "but when have we ever been that lucky?"

"Either way," said Blue. "It looks like whatever they're trying, they're trying it _now_. We don't have much time."

Gansey brushed his thumb against his lower lip as he processed this. "Should we split up, then?" he suggested hesitantly. "If we all go in different directions, we have a better chance of figuring out where they went."  
"Sounds a little horror movie-ish though, don't you think?" Blue pointed out. "That's when we start being picked off one by one."

Adam shook his head. "I don't think we need to split up at all. You said they're probably looking for better energy?"

Blue nodded.

Adam gave Gansey a pointed look. "The pond. And that giant oak tree. Name somewhere that seems more supernaturally charged than that."

Gansey thought about this. He had seen plenty of inexplicable things in his career, but the pure energy, the feeling of _otherness_ , had been one he'd only felt once before, eighteen years ago. One foot on the doorstep of the universe.

"If I was going for maximum magical potency, that _is_ where I would go," Gansey acquiesced. "Granted, I know very little about the subject."

He didn't bring up the fear nagging at the back of his mind; that if this part of the forest had already darkened and changed in response to whatever was happening, that he didn't know how an area laced so thickly with magic would respond. Fish had changed before his eyes in response to a thought—how would it react to whatever was threatening to unmake it?

Blue arched an eyebrow. "A magically charged pond?"

"Or just a magical one," Gansey said. "Unless that's the same thing."

"It's more of an atmospheric sort of deal," Adam tried to explain.

"I think you would be better off just showing me."

It was only a few minutes' walk further into the forest, or at least that's what it had felt like. The knowledge of being in limbo, trapped in a moment of time that could choose to stretch itself into years or compress into seconds, only further contributed to the unease of the procession. It was not getting any darker and their surroundings did not get any more twisted or gnarled as Gansey had guessed they might. But the feeling was there. He didn't know if it was the forest was doing it to him or his own anxieties.

His mind always had been his own greatest enemy, or at least this is what his parents had told him growing up, as he became more and more obsessed with the threat he saw looming above him in the sky.

 _"Seeing something like that... that boy dying can mess with your head. It's perfectly normal."_

His father had known very little about psychology outside of a few dusty books he owned for "academic interest", but "perfectly normal" had become the Gansey party line for its youngest member's behavior, an official diagnosis that really, nothing was actually wrong. And Gansey was quite good at it, fitting into the charade of black-tie parties and high society, being the perfect son with some "delightfully odd interests", as a family friend had remarked.

Any ugliness, well... it had been far more appropriate to keep that kind of thing private.

It had become easy to doubt his emotions, to assume that fear and discomfort had resulted from some kind of imbalance on his part, but this was real. Screw them all, this had been real.

He had always known, somewhere deep and painful, that it had always been real.

He didn't know what he had expected to see when they got to the clearing. Maybe Turner Gladwell, maybe the makings of whatever ritual had been deconstructed a few minutes back, maybe just a blackened hole and festering infected ooze where trees and water had been.

He hadn't expected it to look just as they had left it. He also hadn't expected Ronan Lynch to be there.

It was like a moment from a dream; sunlight danced from above as pleasantly as it ever had while the wind whispered secrets and songs and amongst it all, right next to the hollowed tree, Lynch lay asleep, tall and muscular and terrifying, and yet somehow as fitting a part of this portrait of loveliness as the rest of it.

The sleeping bit still seemed a bit inappropriate for the situation, in Gansey's opinion, until he recalled the whole magic dreaming thing, at which point it just became concerning instead.

"Should we wake him up?" Adam asked hesitantly and Gansey found himself really resenting being the senior agent on this mission.

He looked hopefully to Blue, who only made a face and shrugged.

It turned out it didn't really matter what he thought, though, because a moment later there came a startling gasp as Lynch's eyes flew open. His hand clutched furiously at something, a clump of blood and feathers, but the rest of his body hung in a horrifying, limp way. Blood pooled in the corners of his mouth and for a moment, with his eyes wide open and his pale skin illuminated by sunlight, he looked a bit like a vampire.

Gansey thought, fancifully, that vampires would be a much more straightforward sort of thing to deal with.

The three of them just watched him, transfixed by the bizarreness of it all and paralyzed by silence, until he stirred yet again, spitting blood from his mouth and snapping "You guys just fucking stare like that at everyone you meet? This isn't a goddamn movie."

"You can spare us the sass, Lynch," Adam said curtly. "What the hell is going on here?"

"Still none of your business."

"Except that it really is, isn't it? Do you think somehow what happens to the rest of the world only affects you?"

Lynch smiled slowly at them and Gansey recognized the intent of it. He crossed his arms.

"I don't care if you don't trust us. I don't care if you don't like us. No really, I don't. But what matters here is that I think we might be on the same side. So really," Gansey said coolly. "I don't give a fuck about how much we like each other right now. I just want you to tell me what's going on."

He was aware of Adam and Blue's eyes fixed on him. His voice had a venom it rarely carried, a stove top turned down to a single, simmering flame.

"Also," he added, because it was probably important. "We know about the dreaming thing."

For a moment, the cool exterior fell entirely; Lynch didn't even bother to appear unsurprised.

"How?" It was less a question than it was a demand.

"Psychic intuition," Adam said from behind him and Lynch snorted.

"Alright, now it's your turn to cut the crap, Parrish."

Adam merely shrugged. "No, really."

Ronan regarded them both for a long moment. "If you two really know about this stuff, then you should get why the feds are the last people I want to involve in this."

And Gansey did get it, that deep mistrust of the people they worked for, the feeling that those above knew things they kept carefully hidden and held the secrets of people who had the misfortune of stumbling into the unknown and into the way of higher institutions. He didn't have to look back at Adam to know that he understood as well, perhaps on a more intimate level than Gansey ever could. It was true that Gansey had never had magic bursting from his mind like Ronan Lynch did, a dangerous wealth of secrets embedded into his very being, but he had seen a hundred cases closed by his superiors with answers that didn't satisfy him. People he could have helped who instead were told there was nothing that anybody could do. He understood, but there was no way to say any of this without it sounding hollow and performative from a man on the government's payroll.

So he didn't say any of it. "Unfortunately, it looks like we're already involved. What is this place? Do you know?"

Lynch sighed moodily before meeting Gansey's eyes. "Dream place." Adam had opened his mouth to question that, so he said venomously, "It's a place _from_ a dream except it's here now. But it's... uh... it's older than that, I guess. I don't really know to explain it. It's something that's always existed except right now it's here and right now it's a forest."

"Well, how did it get here then?" asked Adam.

"How do you think? I fucking dreamt it."

Gansey got a sudden surge of the feeling he had had in those barns, seeing a world of creation that shouldn't exist. He laughed suddenly, aware that it hardly fit the mood but caring very little about that. "Shit."

Lynch grinned. "Shit is right. I don't understand either really, but it exists. It knows me somehow, whatever that means."

"Then you know what's happening to it," said Blue.

He regarded her skeptically. "I don't think we've met," he said with a mocking sort of politeness.

"We haven't."

He nodded a bit, clearly amused, but wasn't the same sort of derisive mirth he had repeatedly responded to Gansey and Adam with. It was almost impressed.

"The thing is that I don't really. It started pretty recently, with uhh... well, with that kid. When I dream, this is where I go and Cabeswater—that's what this place is called—it had started seeming different. More tired than it had ever been before, and darker. I hadn't thought much about it, though; I don't know I guess, I thought I was going through an angsty period or something and it was just reflecting that. This whole place is so... uh..."

"Impressionable?" Gansey tried to fill in. Both Ronan and Adam shot him an annoyed glance but Lynch still nodded.

"More or less. But then those kids showed up in the fucking car. Yeah, in my dream. I had never seen other people there before. Maybe just nobody goes hiking around there, I don't know, but I didn't really know what to do so I just sort of backed off while they messed around. Then, all of a sudden, things started getting weird—they probably told you about that: the rain, the animals, whatever. And then this bright light and I see this kid just pulled into the air..."

Gansey couldn't breathe. He felt like he was having one of his own memories read back to him, a perfect transcript of his own thoughts. The tone in Lynch's voice... he had seen it. Just as Gansey encountered worlds above all those eighteen years before, Lynch had seen the same mere days ago. Noah could have been so very, very close.

"Anyway, I woke up right after and ran outside as soon as I could pull myself together and there it was. Way out in the distance from where I live and just the final moments, but there was a tiny flash of white I knew couldn't be anything else."

"And then the next day in the news..." Blue said slowly.

"Exactly. At first, I wasn't sure if maybe I had somehow accidentally done this to him through my dream. You know, thought about something crazy happening on accident and then it playing out in reality, but then things started getting even weirder. My dreams got darker, Cabeswater got uglier, things in my head started trying to kill me again-" He stopped talking abruptly; he had said too much. "There's something stirring here, trying to wake up, or it's already awake and it's trying to get out. I'm not sure if there's really a difference. It speaks to me when my eyes are closed. And—maybe because I created this place—I feel it inside of me, trying to destroy me the same way it's destroying Cabeswater. So that's why I'm here now. That's why you ran into me on your little excursion back here the first time. I keep going back so I can try to figure out what it is I need to fix and then I leave when it turns into too much of a horror show for me to deal with."

There was a long silence as they took this in. Far from this all becoming clearer, Gansey was only all the more overwhelmed with the insurmountability of the situation. But he simultaneously found himself impressed by whatever fiercely indestructible quality made up a man like Ronan Lynch. A body at war with greater cosmic forces within and outside itself, to have created great bodies of magic from the deep recesses of your mind and hold at bay an ancient corruption within them… Gansey could tell simply from looking at Lynch that this was hardly the first battle he had fought, with himself or with the world, and yet he had emerged somehow victorious and stronger for it. They lived in a world, Gansey reflected, that was capable of such great evil, of destruction and devastation he couldn't even comprehend. But there was an incredible power in humanity that was so easy to forget. It was so easy to forget that even when the evil before you seemed blinding, you might close your eyes and still win anyway.

"So do you guys know what all of this stuff is about, then?"

"Well," said Adam. "Gansey has a theory."

Ronan turned his eyes towards Gansey, who suddenly felt very foolish. "Aliens."

Ronan nodded slowly. "Well, okay then."

"It's a working theory," Gansey admitted. "I'm open. But you have to understand that much of what you've described… it's similar to other accounts." _My account._

"What was the ritual stuff for, then?" Adam asked suddenly.

Lynch frowned. "The what?"

"The bones and blood stuff back there," said Blue. "Does that have something to do with this? Seeing what's going on on the other side or whatever?"

He shook his head. "I don't know what you're talking about."

The feeling in Gansey's gut twisted and grew to the point of nausea. "We need to get out of here—"

 _"Now?"_

"Or they do." He gestured to Blue and Ronan, who immediately began protesting. " _No._ There's an unknown party out there setting up some kind of _blood ritual_ and I'm not going to have a bunch of civilians around when they show up."

Things suddenly felt as if they were moving fast and the look in Adam's eyes told him that he wasn't the only one who felt it—the surge of adrenaline, the feeling of being watched. He didn't know if this was a warning from Cabeswater, or simply an entity that liked to play with its food.

Adam drew his gun, pointing it out into the blackness of overgrown trees. "Who's there?"

Several things happened at once. Above them, a flurry of lights began flickering like Fourth of July sparklers or unknown stars supernova-ing from existence. Ronan fell to the ground, the ends of his fingertips suddenly rendered dark and brittle. Black ooze was manifesting horribly somewhere behind his eyes. In the distance, there was a rustle, the cracking of scattered twigs, and a figure that appeared in sharped silhouette against the trees, illuminated in only brief segments by the flashing of lights, like the crude animation flipbooks Gansey and his sister would make as kids. A stick figure who jumped choppily into action from one page to another, only this time, the stick figure held a gun in one hand and a knife in the other. This time, the stick figure had blood, not his own, splashed up the length of his arms. This time, the stick figure was Turner Gladwell.

The stick figure analogy, Gansey reflected, had probably stopped being a good one several thoughts ago.

For a moment, he stood like that, one man in a sea of blood and light, overwhelmed by the possibility of action before him, and the futility of each choice.

 _Take it one at a time._ It was a distant, strangely calm sort of thought. _You can't do everything at once, so don't worry about anything but what you're focusing on._

Adam's gun was still drawn in the direction of the distant forest and the boy who looked like he had escaped from the set of a horror movie, so Gansey turned his attention to Lynch, who was in a state of supernatural disarray that only seemed to be getting worse.

"What's going on?" he asked, but Lynch was clearly in no condition to answer. He looked helplessly to Blue, who for the first time in the short while they had known each other, seemed to be at a loss.

"This forest…" she began. "Whatever power is here—"

"It's corrupting him in the same way," Gansey said, realization dawning.

"I might be making it worse," she admitted. "I can make people's energy stronger and right now… the forest might be taking it."

Gansey looked at her. "And you're just telling me this _now_?"

"Adam knew about it!" she said defensively. "Though I don't know that he ever really believed it."

Beside them, Ronan groaned in something like agony—whatever battle was raging inside him, he was clearly losing.

"Can you cut it off?" Gansey asked. "Do you think you could give energy to him instead of to whatever's taking it from you?"

Blue frowned. "I can try, but—"

"That's the best we can hope for now." Gansey reached into his pocket for his card, quickly scribbling a number onto the back. "I need you to get both of you out of here."

"But if I can—"

"The most important thing right now is that you get out of here _call this number_. It should take you to the FBI. Read them this code and tell them Dick Gansey told you to call and that we need backup immediately."

She opened her mouth to protest again.

 _"Blue._ I need to make sure that someone calls this number. If you don't get Ronan out of here, he could die. If you don't get out of here, you could die. Adam and I are trained to deal with this sort of thing—"

"Not _this_ sort of thing."

"No," he said quietly, "I guess not."

Blue's mouth became a firm line. "Okay," she said with a nod. "Stay safe."

"You too."

She helped Lynch to his feet and, for a moment, Gansey was struck by how small she seemed amongst everything. He found himself by another pang of worry, but there was no time, and besides, he had already begun to see what a fierce and remarkable creature Blue Sargent could be.

He turned back towards Adam, who seemed to be trying to speak with Turner. Everything about the situation had been unexpected. In all the end scenarios Gansey had imagined for this case, the idea of the teenager appearing this threatening, this disheveled and maniacal, had never occurred to him.

The lights continued to flash. Gansey felt nauseous. He had been here before, he thought. When had he been here before?

"Turner, put down the gun," he could hear Adam say. The voice felt quiet, distant. Where had Adam gone, that he had gotten so far away? "We're here to help you."

"The boy is here to help himself." It was a teenager's voice, in sync with the moving of Turner's lips, but the sound came from the inside of Gansey's head, echoing violently through the recesses of his skull. "He is here to help us."

The lights were brighter now. Gansey could only see the lights, the reprieves in their flashing a comforting darkness and nothing more.

"What does that mean?" Adam said, more distant than ever. "What are you trying to do?"

"Waking. Blood will be spilled on the ley lines, the lines will wake. The lines will give us power, the third sleeper will wake. We will own this place. Even in this distance, this planet is ours."

It was a boy's voice, Gansey realized, but it wasn't Turner Gladwell's. Gansey looked up, up, up towards the flashing lights of the sky.

He was ten years old; he was twenty-eight. He was on the boat; he was in the forest. Recognition soared through his body, at the voice in his head, at the lights in the sky. He had been here before and he would be here again. Somehow, for the past eighteen years, he had been searching for this moment with realizing it.

"Noah!" he called into the void of whiteness. He was so close, so close; he could feel past and present swarming before him in the timeless amalgamation it had always been. "Noah!"

"Gansey?" It was Adam's voice, concerned. In the ensuing moments, Gansey could hear the sounds of a struggle—Turner taking advantage of the moment of distraction to disarm him. It was the white noise sound of a television playing in a crowded restaurant, too divorced from reality to pay much heed.

Gansey nearly tripped over himself in his efforts to get closer, a fruitless attempt for something in the sky. The certainty of it all was intoxicating; everything he had ever searched for was at his fingertips, closer than it might ever be again.

He felt the white lights shining against him. He felt Noah's voice, still with the cadence of the boy he had known all those years ago, reverberating in his head. And in a few last hopeful moments, with stars and light and memories a kaleidoscope around him, he felt Turner Gladwell's hands grasping at his throat.

* * *

Adam was not in the forest. He was not watching his partner spellbound by things filling the sky that shouldn't exist. A gun had not just slipped from his hands and a knife was not about to be plunged into Gansey's back.

He had been in the forest, at one point in time. Or he would be, eventually. He wasn't quite sure which. Time suddenly felt so slippery.

Adam was in a car dealership. The parking lot of one, actually. He had been here before; it had been where he had bought his last car, a sturdy but comfortable vehicle, and it was where, in all likelihood, he would buy his next.

He liked this place because the sales representative would always offer him a glass of water while showing him around. The water had always had lemon slices.

He was holding a glass of water now, he realized. It had two lemon slices.

He looked past his hand and the glass in it to see he was standing next to a flashy red convertible. A saleswoman with dark eyes and a dress that tugged at and hid all the right places stood beside it, keys dangling between her outstretched fingers. She smiled at him as he took the keys and handed her his water.

He had been in this car before. He had almost bought it on the day he had gotten his current car. The feel of the wheel in his hands, the roar of the engine, the seductive curves of the frame had drawn him in like nothing else. He had always wanted to drive a car like this back in high school, when the occasional Aglionby boy had dropped theirs off at Boyd's after some kind of minor inconvenience they couldn't understand. And back in high school, they couldn't do half of what they did with cars these days. He had worked on fancy engines his entire life and dreamed of owning them until suddenly, he could.

He had handed back the keys with the shake of his head and a request to see something a little more practical, his hands still shaking a bit. He would never be able to let himself go as fast as he wanted in something that expensive. Adam wasn't a creature made for risk.

He closed his eyes for a moment and turned the key in the ignition. Nothing happened. He looked back at the saleswoman, who smiled at him, lemon water in hand, as if all was well.

Frowning a bit, he turned the key again. Nothing. He looked up, unsure of what to do next, and a little ways out, right where the street had been the last time he had been here, was Cabeswater.

It was the vision from the tree, he realized dully. Gansey's corpse bled out into the dewy grass and the ritual circle beneath him. And there was Adam next to him—blindly grasping for the body as horrified realization began to dawn.

Adam looked away. Whatever he had seen would be important to him later, or it had been important to him before, but that wasn't here, and it wasn't now.

"I don't think this car is working," he said politely, but the woman still didn't answer. There was a kind of _expectation_ Adam didn't know how to respond to: he was e _xpected_ to turn the car on, he was _expected_ to take it for a test drive. He couldn't just stand up and walk away; it felt wrong.

He knew Gansey would have known what to say, or rather, the car wouldn't have broken for Gansey in the first place, would have responded to the touch of his skin on the wheel as if it had been a holy command.

That wasn't true, Adam remembered suddenly. The Camaro broke down for Gansey quite a lot. That felt wrong somehow, even though Adam could remember half a dozen times it had happened. How unlike Gansey, how fallible and quaint.

Why did he keep driving that car? Adam had never really thought about it before, just felt mild annoyance at Gansey's insistence on turning down government vehicles and planes to wait on the side of the road for a tow truck time and time again. Why was he so ready to always be wrong, always be doubted, in a world where he could so easily have everything be right?

He thought about Gansey. He thought about his pale body lying in darkness—but just for a moment. He thought about his desperate features illuminated in flashes beneath white lights—but just for a moment. He thought about that moment in the mountains, as years of secrets were coming undone, the two of them standing with the moon above and valley below in a world of uncertainty and hurt and yet an undeniable rightness.

He turned the keys one last time and the engine roared to life beneath him.

"I'll take it," he said, loudly so he could be heard, and the woman smiled.

Somewhere else—not here, maybe before, maybe after—Adam jumped in front of the knife.

* * *

"Well," Blue said. "Not too shabby."

Adam blinked, the world reeling and tilting into focus, a blur of white around him. He felt something soft and crisp against his skin—sheets? He was in a bed.

Something still didn't feel quite right even as he regained focus, a euphoric wooziness that made it difficult to collect his senses and process the situation.

Was he _dead?_

Blue frowned. "Are you holding up okay?"

"I… I think so." He considered his next question carefully and then asked, feeling a little embarrassed, "I'm… not _dead_ , right?" He had to check.

He felt decidedly more embarrassed when Blue started laughing. "No, you should be fine; it's probably just the anesthesia making you feel a little off."

"Anesthesia for the…" He suddenly became aware of a bandaged area on his torso and a dulled pain. He sighed. "What happened?"

"How much do you remember?"

Not very much. A blur of motion, a flash of overhead lights, the moment before he—

"I tried to save Gansey. They were trying to make him into the sacrifice and I…" It had all been too fast to think, other than from somewhere distant and out of time. It had been a foolish decision—it wasn't like getting stabbed would do anything to actually stop Turner and what had been controlling him—but he couldn't find himself regretting it.

Suddenly, one fact became horribly clear: his lack of a memory of what had happened and Gansey's absence from the room.

"Is he—"

"He's fine, he's fine," Blue said quickly. "He's just out there dealing with all the other FBI guys that showed up. Pathetic turnout by the way, backup-wise."

They had probably heard whatever fantastic event Blue had described and then Gansey's name and decided that there probably wasn't much of an actual threat at all. He tried to pull himself up. "I should go out there too, help him deal with it."

"Hold on," Blue said. "Before you go out there to talk with your co-workers with a stab wound and high on painkillers, don't you think you should try to jog your memory a bit? Gansey told me everything that went down."

Adam lowered himself back into the bed, a little grateful for the excuse; trying to move had only made his disoriented state and the throbbing pain in his side more potent.

"What did happen, then? After I let myself get stabbed."

Blue smiled weakly. "You did it," she said. "You made the sacrifice."

"But I didn't die."

"That's not as important as you would think, apparently. That kid stabbed you. You were willing to let yourself die to save Gansey; you'd already made the sacrifice."

"Which means… that _I_ was in control of the ley line?"

"Which sounds terrifying, by the way," Blue said. "I'm kind of glad I didn't get to see it—you should ask Gansey to tell you about this part. But I guess the deal is that Cabeswater was fighting for its life against whatever this _thing_ is that was corrupting it, so having a person to manifest in and help control it suddenly made the battle a lot more even."

This was bringing back memories, flashes of distant moments. Adam had not been able to recall what had happened because it had only been partly Adam Parrish who had lived in that period of time.

He breathed heavily. "I didn't stop it or anything. It just made everything tougher than they expected, threw a wrench in the plan when they weren't the ones to control the ley line. It's all still out there."

"Yeah well, baby steps, huh?" Blue said. "You saved everyone for now. You saved Turner, you saved Gansey, you saved Ronan. And now you're in control of these ley lines."

" _Still_? How does that work? What does that mean?"

"According to a cursory web search and Gansey's speculation, it means a lot of things: money, power, magic, whatever you want. You'll get the hang of it."

Adam shook his head. "I don't think I want any of that. Or more than I have. I'm fine."

"Well, make sure to communicate that during your next sacrifice on an ancient ritual circle. I don't think it really works that way. I wouldn't worry about it for now. And now we know what's coming."

"Aliens." Adam laughed despite himself.

"Aliens," Blue agreed with a bemused smirk.

"I still can't believe he was right," Adam shook his head. "This whole time I thought he was crazy, but there were really aliens out there."

"To be fair," said Blue. "I've had a few conversations with the guy and I think he's still wrong about most things. He got pretty lucky on this one."

Adam laughed again. "But you don't know, do you?"

"You never do."

Sometimes the quest for more answers meant discovering you had never had any of the right ones to begin with. There was a sort of peace in letting go of everything and starting over.

Blue looked at him oddly all of a sudden and smiled a strange, analytical smile. It was the look of someone trying to understand what they had just seen. "I still can't believe you did that. Jumping in front of that knife."

He smiled too. "Me neither."

There was a hesitant knock at the hospital room door before Gansey stepped through.

"That was a mess to sort out," he said awkwardly. "I think we might have to fudge a little bit to get them to believe in anything that happened at all." He took Adam in, concern and guilt aching in his hazel eyes. "How do you feel? The doctors said you would be alright, but I know that doesn't make it hurt any less."

"I should go," Blue said suddenly, rising out of her chair. "Leave you government pigs to it. Besides, my family hasn't heard from me in hours now, it'd probably be good for them to know for sure I didn't die or something during my visit."

"I'll see you around, then," Adam said.

She smiled. "Good."

Gansey took Blue's spot in the chair and clasped his hands together in a gesture that reminded Adam a bit of anxious high class ladies on network television period dramas.

"I'm _fine_ ," he said. "I barely even feel it." This part was not true, but it visibly seemed to assuage Gansey's concern.

"I'm glad to hear it," the other man said. "I just… well, I wanted to…" Something tightened between Gansey's eyes; there were excuses and half-truths, and then there was this. "Why did you do that?" he said abruptly, not quite meeting Adam's eyes. "I was the one who lost my mind out there; it was my own fault for letting myself go like that and you could have died, you—"

"I didn't want you to die," Adam said, and he was amazed at how something so simple could be the entire truth. "I saw you the other day. I saw your dead body when we went into that tree and I saw myself finding it and when Turner came at you with that knife all I could think was 'Here we are. You saw the future, Adam, and you didn't believe in it, but here it is coming true anyway _._ ' And so I made sure that it didn't. If you had given me a little more time to think, I probably could have come up with a less dangerous plan."

"I'm not very good at that, I guess," Gansey said. "Giving people enough time to think."

"You do okay."

Gansey bit his lip, glancing up at the ceiling and then to Adam with a kind of speculation and interest he wasn't sure he would ever get used to. "This isn't going to be the end of it, I'm sure you know. I'm fully aware that this sort of thing, the X-File sort of thing, wasn't what you had in mind when you joined the FBI. And now my unprofessionalism nearly got you killed and, well, what I'm trying to say is that I understand if you want to try to transfer partners and work in another division. I can put in a good word for it too."

This was exactly what Adam had wanted since he had first been assigned to the X-Files, to Gansey, but it suddenly felt entirely unthinkable. To leave it all behind, trading worlds he didn't know for the one he did, to trade Gansey for someone else— "Don't be ridiculous," he said. "You can't get rid of me that easily."

Gansey smiled, a little surprised, and Adam felt a vicious pang he suspected was belonging. There was an interim of brief silence where the moment alone was enough.

"What was it that you saw in that tree?" Adam asked. "I told you mine."

"The future," he said thoughtfully. "Or at least one of them."

"The right one?"

Gansey smiled, and looked out the window for a moment, to beyond Henrietta and to things Adam still couldn't quite see. He was very much alive. "I don't know yet. But I think so."


End file.
